Imagined Transnationalism - Graduate Institute of International and

Transcription

U.S. Latino/a Literature, Culture,
and Identity
Edited by Kevin Concannon, Francisco A.
Lomelí, and Marc Priewe
Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01
Imagined Transnationalism
10.1057/9780230103320 - Imagined Transnationalism, Edited by Kevin Concannon, Francisco A. Lomelí and Marc Priewe
IMAGINED TRANSNATIONALISM
First published in 2009 by
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ISBN: 978-0-230-60632-6
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Imagined transnationalism : U.S. latino/a literature, culture, and identity /
Kevin Concannon, Francisco A. Lomelí, and Marc Priewe, eds.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-230-60632-6
1. Hispanic Americans—Social conditions. 2. Community development—
United States. 3. American literature—Hispanic American authors. I.
Concannon, Kevin. II. Lomelí, Francisco A. III. Priewe, Marc.
E184.S75I357 2009
973'.0468—dc22
2009013902
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Design by Macmillan Publishing Solutions
First edition: November 2009
Copyright © Kevin Concannon, Francisco A. Lomelí, and Marc Priewe, 2009.
All rights reserved.
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Printed in the United States of America.
Figures and Tables
v
Introduction
Kevin Concannon, Francisco A. Lomelí, and Marc Priewe
1
1
Chicano Transnation
Bill Ashcroft
2
A Schematic Approach to Understanding Latino
Transnational Literary Texts
Nicolás Kanellos
29
Para Español Oprima El Número Dos: Transnational
Translation and U.S. Latino/a Literature
Marta E. Sánchez
47
Transnational Migrations and Political Mobilizations: The
Case of A Day without a Mexican
María Herrera-Sobek
61
Imagining Transnational Chicano/a Activism against
Gender-Based Violence at the U.S.-Mexican Border
Claudia Sadowski-Smith
75
Precursors of Hemispheric Writing: Latin America, the
Caribbean, and Early U.S. American Identity
Gabriele Pisarz-Ramírez
95
3
4
5
6
7
8
Slammin’ in Transnational Heterotopia: Words Being
Spoken at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe
Harald Zapf
“A Broader and Wiser Revolution”: Refiguring Chicano
Nationalist Politics in Latin American Consciousness in
Post-Movement Literature
Tim Libretti
13
117
Contents
137
9
CONTENTS
With Bertolt Brecht and the Aztecs Toward an Imagined
Transnation: A Literary Case Study
Karin Ikas
157
10 Travel, Autoethnography, and Oppositional Consciousness
in Juan Felipe Herrera’s Mayan Drifter
Maria Antònia Oliver-Rotger
171
11 ¿Dónde estás vos/z?: Performing Salvadoreñidades in
Washington, DC
Ana Patricia Rodríguez
201
12 The Final Frontier: Guillermo Gómez-Peña’s The Great
Mojado Invasion
Catherine Leen
221
13 Writing the Haitian Diaspora: The Transnational Contexts
of Edwidge Danticat’s The Dew Breaker
Ricardo L. Ortíz
237
Notes on Contributors
257
Index
261
iv
Figure 2.1 Hispanic cultures in the United States
Table 2.1 Textual characteristics of U.S. Hispanic literature
32
34
Figures and Tables
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Kevin Concannon, Francisco A. Lomelí, and Marc Priewe
A
t the beginning of Cristina García’s 1992 novel Dreaming in Cuban,
Celia del Pino, the family matriarch, sits on the porch of her home in
Cuba, staring out into the ocean through binoculars, purportedly looking
for an indication of another Bay of Pigs invasion. Celia knows that spotting any sign of an invasion will help her curry favor with Fidel Castro
and show her support of the Revolution. At the same time, her attention
on the ocean becomes a reminder that much of Celia’s family lives away
from Cuba, emphasizing her troubled relationship to an island that she
has sworn to protect, but that also has driven away much of her family
and isolated her.
Celia’s conflicted relationship with Cuba highlights the larger history
of exile for many Cubans from the island who find themselves able but
unwilling to return to a homeland controlled by Castro. The use of the
term “exile” is complicated, since many Cubans left the island as small
children or were not born on the island, as Andrea O’Reilly Herrera (2001)
points out, emphasizing the way in which imagination and history inform
their sense of loss and exile from the island more than personal experience.
The sight of Celia looking to protect Cuba by watching the ocean around it
emphasizes this construction of Cuba as an image—and less a territorially
defined space—as it reminds one of how the island exists within a larger
diasporic consciousness. In a sense, Celia’s role as sentry on the waters
around the island underscores her role as guardian for those thousands
living in the Cuban diaspora in the United States who continue to draw
meaning from an island connection; she is keeping an eye on them from
a distance, stretching the meaning of Cuban identity and belonging to the
communities and individuals beyond Cuba’s shores.
This sense of the island’s deterritorialization is emphasized by Celia’s
attire while looking out into the darkness. Dressed in her “best housedress” (García 1992, 3), and wearing the earrings given to her by her
long-departed lover, Celia’s position as sentry merges into that of the jilted
Introduction
KEVIN CONCANNON, FRANCISCO A. LOMELÍ, AND MARC PRIEWE
lover waiting to welcome her lover Gustavo back from the other side of
the ocean. Celia’s roles as both sentry and lover become reminders of the
draw of the island to those who live beyond its shores, whether it be suspected traitors making plans for another invasion or long-lost lovers being
encouraged to return. The island under Celia’s watch becomes translated
as less a spaciousness of isolation and more a spaciousness of excess, one
that moves beyond its physical and territorial borders. This sense of fluidity is highlighted by a vision Celia has, while on guard, of her husband
seemingly emerging out of the ocean to speak to her. Ill with cancer in a
New York hospital bed, Jorge appears to Celia as a sign that he has passed
away, in a sense returning to the island but never really making it back.
Celia’s vision becomes a reminder of the importance of the imaginary
in defining Celia’s relationship to her family and to the island. Through
Celia’s vision of Jorge, her husband is able to return to the island in terms
of her memory, a vision that supports the continuing significance of the
island in the lives of those who dwell in the diaspora.
Celia’s experience on the shores of Cuba highlights many of the important themes addressed in this collection. Her role as sentry guarding the
shores of the island emphasizes the ways in which migration today cannot
be seen as a one-time, unidirectional event, and, at the same time, return
to one’s exiled home cannot be defined always solely in terms of physical movement. Celia’s experience helps us to see how the recent phases of
globalization have ushered in new forms of migrations that have decisively
impacted the course and flow of cultures and identities, especially in the
Western Hemisphere. Even as families, or whole villages, have relocated to
(and often from) the United States, many of today’s migrants are no longer “at home” in one nation-state; they are often becoming transnational
migrants, who live in a state of physical and intercultural transit between
two or more national communities. The increasing permeability of boundaries between nation-states has threatened the traditional definition of an
identifiable “homeland” from which to migrate and points instead toward
a burgeoning transnational spaciousness crisscrossed by, among other
things, movement, investment, TV images, text messages, cell phones, and
videoconferencing. In this way, much migration to the United States has, in
a sense, already occurred, either as a result of the growing global media and
marketing strategies that turn other parts of the world into a U.S. subsidiary, or through a culture industry that stereotypes the future existence of
migrants in the United States. Many migrants, it seems, are caught within
a nebulous and paradoxical spaciousness where arrival is indefinitely postponed, and where one seems already “there” without ever leaving home.
We are thus witness to an increasingly global phenomenon variously called “vernacular cosmopolitanism” (Bhabha), “transmigrancy”
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(Glick Schiller et al.), or “globalization from below” (Falk). These terms,
among others, have now become part and parcel of an ever-increasing
ensemble of signifiers that point to new cosmopolitan practices in which
people on the move retain certain elements of their national identities and
modes of cultural interaction, while also negotiating the demands of their
host cultures. More popularly conceived today as the transnational, these
bifurcated experiences of the migrant and the native emphasize a changing
understanding of how we define mobility, belonging, and the nation. In the
U.S. context, such an understanding dates back to Randolph Bourne’s use of
the term “transnational” in his famous essays “Trans-national America” and
“The Jew and Trans-national America,” both originally published in 1916,
in which transnational refers to the importance of a more international
understanding of American identity. Arguing against those who believed
that immigrants held too tenacious a grip on their past homelands, Bourne
was convinced of the benefits of dual identities and simultaneous space
construction, maintaining that immigrant populations represented “threads
of living and potent cultures, blindly striving to weave themselves into a
novel international nation, the first the world has seen” (Bourne 1916/1964,
120). Within this celebratory image one finds the outlines of much of the
current discussions of the transnational as a critical methodology. Much
as Bourne sees the transnational as a means of undermining certain myths
of the nation, most notably the melting pot, critics today conceptualize the
transnational as a means of challenging those myths of the nation that seek
to marginalize others based upon race, gender, or sexual orientation. In
doing so, a transnational approach can sometimes be mistakenly believed to
be a libratory one, as conceiving of the world in terms of a mixture of flows
of capital and individuals, and less in terms of boundaries, not recognizing
the challenges faced by immigrants being forced to leave their home or being
confronted with material and metaphorical barriers.
Bourne’s vision of the transnational as rooted in the nation-state challenges more current conceptualizations of transnationalism that often
denote and celebrate identities and cultural representations “beyond the
nation.” To Bourne, distant conviviality or coexistence is very much an
“American” experience, only to be understood by those who have been
to the United States. As such, the nation and the transnational become
inextricably linked, so much so that the transnational in Bourne’s essays
becomes a means of celebrating the United States in terms of its difference
with other nations, refiguring mythical national narratives of the United
States as the city on the hill through a transnational perspective. It is this
concern that has been voiced by many critics today, questioning how one
can navigate between the terms “nation” and “transnational,” without also
recognizing the different ways in which the transnational can also work
INTRODUCTION
to reaffirm the nation-state. As many scholars in American Studies argue,
it is difficult to undertake seemingly transnational work outside of the
shadows of America, an often unrecognized furthering of Bourne’s legacy
(cf. Briggs et al. 2008).
In a similar vein, the ethnic referent “Latino/a” in part replicates both the
U.S. cultural mirage of melting pot unity and its Bournean counter-model
by assimilating members of various Latin American subgroups living in
the United States into an imagined, transnational cultural and communal
formation (cf. Rodriguez 2002, 109). That is, the label “Latino/a” subsumes
a variety of nationals from the Western Hemisphere (or their descendants)
who moved to the United States and who share an ostensibly common
language, culture, and history. Although such a broad and highly contested
definition raises more questions than it answers—for instance, exactly
which linguistic, cultural, or historical features are sufficient, and which
are necessary, in applying this particular ethnic label?—“Latino/a” remains
a useful shorthand for designating specific minoritarian experiences in the
United States. Obviously, Latino/a social, political, and cultural experiences are in many respects similar to those of other ethnic groups in the
United States; however, the ways in which “transnationalism” suffuses and
shapes these experiences are unprecedented. For the contributors of this
collection, then, “Latino/a” is a valuable category of investigation precisely because it represents transnational features of specific and salient
movements and connectivities: temporary or permanent migrations to
and from the United States; cultural exchanges among and beyond U.S.
Latino/a subgroups; the imagination of manifold ties, in the past, present,
and future, within transnational spaces across the Western Hemisphere.
These transnational spaces between the United States and Latin
America foster the emergence of pluri-local identities that are no longer subject to a unified, national imaginary. As a result, the dichotomy
between acculturation and alienation in/from the United States has significantly changed toward various forms of transculturations, as migrated
cultural practices are being filtered and recontextualized transnationally.
Experiences of many so-called transmigrants in the United States, especially in “global cities” (Sassen), differ substantially from earlier migratory patterns in that assimilation to or estrangement from the culture of
dominance has ceased to constitute the core of the migratory experience.
Moreover, the plural experiences (and the representations) of migrant
communities in the United States are no longer contained nor constrained
by the “Manichean delirium” (Fanon) established by colonialism and
postcolonialism. Instead, over the past two decades, migrants who come
to the United States, especially from Latin American countries, are frequently finding themselves multi-positioned, involved in relations to more
4
5
than one location, tradition, cultural, or social praxis. In short, for many
migrants, a sense of home is no longer neat or easy to define as they live or
interact with more than one spatial and cultural location, thus undermining the sense of one nation. Their cultural practices are therefore often
no longer primarily constituted around essences (of nation, tradition,
religion), but relationally, connecting different cultural spaces in ways that
defy simplistic mapping. Critical scholarly analysis of these processes must
thus try to uncover the transversal elements of cultural mobility, especially
the efforts and structures of the flows and connectivities that (re)configure
contemporary cultures at “home” and “abroad.”
Conceptualizations of contemporary culture reflecting the impact
of globalization sometimes have a tendency to conceive of culture with
their own indelible characteristics that are then somehow penetrated or
pervaded by phenomena such as intercultural contacts and global flows.
In the process, heterogeneous, even irreconcilable, elements are then seen
to be “somehow” incorporated, combined, or mixed to give way to new,
hybrid configurations. Concepts such as multiculturalism or interculturality, while seemingly moving beyond traditional holistic concepts of
culture, in fact, still conceptually presuppose these holistic concepts as
givens, as that from which their recombinatory procedures can usefully
begin. From such an essentially stationary point of view, cultures appear to
be stable and preexisting wholes composed of localized elements that are
then impacted by migrations and transmigrations to give rise to hybrid or
crossover products or practices.
Imagined Transnationalism takes a different approach, one that reverses
the ontological polarity of this mode of theorization, by focusing instead
on transnational connectivities and flows generally within the Western
Hemisphere and at times reaching to Europe and Asia. According to such
a focus, cultures organize themselves not around delimitation, the shoring
up of unique, indistinguishable features (however “hybrid” they may be);
rather, they are centrally about people being “in touch,” about negotiation and dialogue. Analysis of such cultural formations requires sustained
attention to those occasions and locations, positions in space and time
that are, in the most generative sense, pivotal sites for, and products of,
transnational flows.
Bill Ashcroft’s essay, “Chicano Transnation,” begins this collection by
complicating our understanding of the nation-state and thereby encouraging one to reexamine how terms such as “diaspora” and “migrancy” are
to be understood. The hyphen of the nation-state becomes for Ashcroft
a signifier of separation rather than connection, and his essay calls for
the possibility of multiple nations within the state. Seen in this way, the
state is no longer understood in homogenous terms, but as made up of
INTRODUCTION
multiple nations that themselves are in transition. By purposefully adopting the term “transnation” rather than the more common “transnational,”
Ashcroft emphasizes this sense of instability of the state, that the transnational subject should be seen as one that does move not only beyond
the state but beyond the many nations that make up the nation-state. To
Ashcroft, the transnation “does not refer to an object in political space. It
is a way of talking about subjects in their ordinary lives, subjects who live
in-between the categories by which subjectivity is normally constituted.”
The borderlands hence become a means of conceptualizing these subjects
who “live in-between” because they underscore images of the nation-state
crisscrossed by borders that do not simply reflect the geographic margin of
the state. Through the uncertainty of the borderlands, one sees the nationstate as one conceived of in terms of a fluidity of nations, of crossings and
migrations, that in part explain the birth of different nationalist movements, and specifically for Ashcroft, the Chicano nationalist movement.
Nicolás Kanellos’ “A Schematic Approach to Understanding Latino
Transnational Literary Texts” also challenges present-day constructions of
transnational mobility by contextualizing U.S.-Latino/a transnationalism
within a deeper historical context. Problematizing calls to see the transnational as an approach that only reflects this contemporary period, Kanellos
highlights the voluminous written and transnational history of Hispanics
in the United States. By doing so, his essay highlights how traditional conceptions of immigrant literature often disregard U.S. Latino/a literature,
either from the mistaken belief that the only material available would be
lost oral stories or that early Hispanic literature cannot be understood in
terms of an immigrant paradigm. By exploring the different categories of
the native, immigrant, and exiled Latino/a writer, Kanellos emphasizes the
significance of a transnational perspective to understanding early textual
practices, but, more specifically, how authors, by moving between categories emphasize the fluidity of such terms. By doing so, the essay develops
connections between an array of Latino/a cultures, complicating attempts
to map difference in terms of geography or nation-space by posing vital
cultural and political connections between authors.
By foregrounding this history of the United States, Kanellos’ essay
challenges both how the immigrant narrative is conceived as well as how
the nation itself is to be understood. Marta Sánchez’s essay, “Para Español
Oprima el Número Dos: Trans-national Translation and U.S. Latino/a
Literature,” develops this critique of the nation by looking at the ways
in which the rise in the number of Spanish speakers in the United States
impacts calls to see English as the national language. Through an analysis
of what she terms “trans-national translation,” Sánchez looks specifically
at the publication of an increasing number of translations of Latino/a
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literature, written in English and published in the United States, into
Spanish and directed to the Spanish-speaking population of the United
States. The popularity of these translations, by publishing houses such as
Random House and Harper Collins, constructs a linguistic mapping of the
nation that is rooted not in juridical notions of citizenship or geographic
ideas of the border, but in terms of movement, growth, and economic
power. As a consequence, language becomes no longer a means of unifying
the nation, but instead a means of identifying its fissures, detaching our
understanding of the transnational from individual or collective mobility
to focus instead on how nation-space itself has become “mobile,” rendered
fluid by changing faces of economic and political power. The individual
or collective no longer crosses over a geographic border to become seen
in transnational terms, but becomes crossed itself by multiple national
borders, emphasizing that transnational subjectivity is to be conceived as
a process, one that must negotiate a number of borderlands.
If the transnational experience means in part being crossed by different
national or economic borders, one is left to wonder about the possibilities
for political activism. In a world where economic investment and political
action can challenge an individual’s national belonging in ways that are
not always visible or even intelligible, questions concerning the forming of
communal action or of creating political change become even more central. María Herrera-Sobek’s contribution to this collection, “Transnational
Migrations and Political Mobilizations: The Case of A Day Without a
Mexican,” explores these issues by examining both the film A Day Without
a Mexican as well as the recent political protests that have adopted the
film’s portrayal of a United States without Mexicans. Herrera-Sobek’s opening quotation, “In order to make the invisible visible you make it disappear,” marks a salient contradiction that emphasizes the extent of the many
challenges faced by the Latino/a population in gaining equal footing in
the United States. At the same time, it is the very possibility of Latino/as
“choosing” disappearance that strikes at the possibility of change, of disappearing in such a way as to reimagine what “invisibility” in the nation
might actually mean. As the protests of 2007 remind us, and as HerreraSobek highlights, this reimagining extends beyond the practical action of
boycotts to include a reimagining of national belonging.
Claudia Sadowski-Smith’s essay, “Imagining Transnational Chicano/a
Activism against Gender-Based Violence at the U.S.-Mexico Border,”
examines both literary and filmic texts that present fictionalized representations of the recent disappearance and death of hundreds of women
along the Juárez-El Paso border. The texts she explores, Gregory Nava’s film
Bordertown, Alicia Gaspar de Alba’s Desert Blood, and Stella Duarte’s If I
Die in Juárez, all work to challenge the political silence that has surrounded
INTRODUCTION
these crimes, as well as highlight the transnational context behind them.
As Sadowski-Smith notes, these crimes have been perceived as a product of
the larger economic flows that crisscross the border. U.S. capital is used to
fund the maquiladoras (assembly plants), whose mostly female workforce
create the goods that are then shipped back across the border and who
are also often the victims of these crimes. The majority of the atrocities
remain unsolved, and Sadowski-Smith examines how Nava’s, Gaspar de
Alba’s, and Duarte’s texts construct differing senses of political activism in
the hope of stopping the growing number of femicides. Similar to other
essays in this collection, Sadowski-Smith looks to examine the drawing of
connections across the border, but is sensitive to the ways in which differential economic and political opportunities on each side of the border
challenge ideas of a truly transnational activism. As a result, the border is
conceived as both a site of seemingly unbridled economic movement and
a line of difference, where simplistic notions of transnational activism and
community are compromised.
Gabriele Pisarz-Ramírez’s essay, “Precursors of Hemispheric Writing:
Latin America, the Caribbean, and Early U.S. American Identity,” looks at
the ways in which late eighteenth-century writers sought to separate the
burgeoning U.S. nation from England by creating a cultural genealogy
that drew upon “pre-Columbian cultures as part of the emerging nation’s
tradition and history.” Such an essentially hemispheric view of the nation
works at once to create an instant history and culture for North America,
even as this constructed history is at odds with how Native Americans were
treated on the continent and by later nineteenth-century U.S. imperialist
views. Just as American writers appropriated and modified Latin American
cultural identity to suit the political whims of a developing nation, PisarzRamírez argues that abolitionists in the nineteenth century often turned
to the Caribbean in order to write into existence alternative versions of
national communities, opposed to inequality and slavery. These different
visions of the construction of the United States underscore “the importance of non-European points of reference in the construction of identities
in the early national period,” as well as the discursive transnational underpinnings of the United States as a nation.
Harald Zapf ’s contribution, “Slammin’ in Transnational Heterotopia:
Words Being Spoken at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe,” continues this focus
on the Caribbean by exploring different ways in which Nuyorican spokenword poetry creates a transnational vision. While the very term “Nuyorican”
is often understood as referring to a mixture of New York and Puerto Rico,
conjuring up a history of migration between the two locations, Zapf
explores how over time the meaning of the term has changed, transcending
an insular ethnic understanding to include issues of economics, physical
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place, and cultural performativity. Drawing on a comparison between two
anthologies by writers who are connected to the Nuyorican Poets Café,
Zapf ’s essay explores the history of this institution, using as signposts
Miguel Algarín and Miguel Piñero’s 1975 collection Nuyorican Poetry:
An Anthology of Puerto Rican Words and Feelings and Algarín’s later 1994
collection coedited with Bob Holman, Aloud: Voices from the Nuyorican
Poets Café. The nearly twenty-year span allows Zapf to examine important
thematics that remain constant at the Café and its poetry, including the
democracy of performance, while at the same time identifying important
changes that have occurred, including a deemphasizing of ethnic or racial
identity. The result is an exploration of a transnational practice that avoids
common references to border crossing or movement, a “de-essentialized”
transnationalism, as Zapf terms it, that seeks to represent transnational
experiences as coded in terms of performance and language.
By exploring the Nuyorican Poets Café as a cultural practice, Zapf ’s
essay examines how the spoken-word poetry of the mid-1990s looks past
the nation as a critical term of definition. As a theoretical approach, the
transnational is conceived as a means of questioning the narratives defining the nation and national belonging, opening up the nation to alternative
representations of history, identity, and race. Within this model, the nation
and nationalism have become conceived in problematic terms, as using
violence and racism as a means to conceal the fissures that threaten to
fracture the space of the nation. The question becomes, however, whether
the “nation” as a term has lost its critical relevance. Tim Libretti’s essay, “‘A
Broader and Wiser Revolution’: Refiguring Chicano Nationalist Politics in
Latin American Consciousness in Post-Movement Literature,” examines
this question, arguing that the nation and nationalist politics remain a crucial means of political organization and definition within a larger international context. Drawing on the works of Cherríe Moraga, Graciela Limón,
and Helena María Viramontes, Libretti shows how these authors look to
“re-situate” Chicano nationalist politics within a contemporary context,
one that reflects the growth of a larger Latino/a population.
Karin Ikas’ essay also points to the changing face of the United States
population by highlighting how the growing Latino/a population necessitates a reexamination of the myth of Aztlán, as well as a reimagining of
the borderlands as a spaciousness of transgression. Through an analysis
of Cherríe Moraga’s play The Hungry Woman: The Mexican Medea, Ikas is
critical of any calls for a new Aztlán, while arguing for the need to challenge traditional conceptions of the nation-state. Using Bill Ashcroft’s term
“transnation” as a guide, Ikas argues for the need to conceive of the term in
a more complicated manner, as in fact a state made up of multiple nations.
This fragmentary vision challenges traditionally understood relationships
INTRODUCTION
between center and periphery and emphasizes the importance of understanding the borderlands in metaphorical terms. By calling for an end to
the more traditionally viewed nation-state, Ikas is drawing attention to
those groups who find themselves exiled within the nation, and, through
her reading of Moraga, to a possible future where, according to Ashcroft,
“national and cultural affiliations are superseded.”
Maria Antònia Oliver-Rotger’s essay investigates Juan Felipe Herrera’s
novel Mayan Drifter through the prism of postcolonial conceptualizations
of travel writing. She explores how the text both complicates and replicates
power hierarchies deeply embedded in the Western tradition of ethnography, which places observer and observed, self and other, in a dichotomous
relation. Crossing national, cultural, and linguistic borders, the narrative
voice in Mayan Drifter exemplifies how transnational U.S. Latino/a subject
positions are often characterized by a “utopian longing for wholeness, but
[are] confronted with the disjointed remnants of modern history.” That is,
Oliver-Rotger’s analysis shows how U.S. Latino/as are themselves implicated in reproducing power relations abroad that they justifiably criticize
at home.
Ana Patricia Rodríguez’s contribution continues this examination
of Latino/a subjectivity by looking closely at the developing Salvadoran
diaspora in the United States. By exploring the question of what it means
to identify oneself as Salvadoran in Washington, D.C., Rodríguez’s essay
challenges attempts to link individual identity to the nation, by looking
at the ways in which identity is constructed in translocal or intercultural
contexts. Such a borderlands identity is reflected by the hybrid crossings
of language that Rodríguez analyzes, emphasizing how Salvadoran identity
becomes understood as the “ability to masticate or domesticate multiple
languages into new hybrid articulations or code-switching practices.”
Rather than conceiving of this sense of mixture and movement only in
terms of loss, Rodríguez examines the ways these changes can be seen as
productive, as complicating essentialist attempts to connect Latino/a identity formations with Spanish language use, and as providing the opportunity to participate in “larger hybrid social dynamics.”
Catherine Leen’s essay, “The Final Frontier: Guillermo Gómez-Peña’s
The Great Mojado Invasion,” examines the ways in which Gómez-Peña’s
recent work challenges how difference is conceptualized by looking at the
slippery use of “alien” in today’s society. Playing upon the meaning of the
term as both a political designation for those who do not have citizenship
as well as a reference to beings from outer space, Gómez-Peña complicates
our understanding of the history of Mexican American relations, mixing
seeming historical fact with science-fiction fantasy. As Leen highlights,
Gómez-Peña’s approach forces one to reexamine the political and cultural
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underpinnings of how we conceptualize the nation, underscoring an ambiguity in those cultural and historical narratives that seek to authenticate
belonging and otherness. Similar to other Gómez-Peña performances, the
border is a central figure in this text, but as Leen’s analysis makes clear, the
movement across the geographic space of the border must be understood
in metaphorical terms as well. The documentary style that is adopted
in The Great Mojado Invasion, for instance, becomes complicated by the
introduction or crossing over of elements of sci-fi fictionality, emphasizing how the film works as a transnational project, complicating national
belonging by asking the central question, who or what does not belong?
Ricardo Ortíz’s essay, “Writing the Haitian Diaspora: The Trans-national
Contexts of Edwidge Danticat’s The Dew Breaker,” continues this exploration of national borders and belonging by drawing parallels between the
health risks faced by those in U.S. prisons awaiting deportation hearings
and the violence that seems an inextricable part of Haitian national history
and identity. Through his examination of the work of Danticat the parallel is made explicit, since, as Ortíz observes, Danticat’s uncle died in U.S.
prison while awaiting a hearing on his request for asylum from Haiti. The
mistreatment by U.S. authorities that leads to her uncle’s death emphasizes
the linkage of violence and the nation, making the question of who does
not belong into a declarative statement: he or she will not belong.
The challenge Danticat faces in coming to terms with this legacy of violence that extends beyond the borders of both Haiti and the United States
becomes, as Ortíz highlights, a transnational process: “Danticat hopes to
contribute, and precisely, strategically from her diasporic location, to what
is now a transnational process of coming to terms with all the worst crimes
committed, often in the name of the Haitian people and by institutions (like
the nation-state) claiming to act for, and even as, the Haitian people, against
the Haitian people” (emphasis original). The larger implication of this transnational perspective is clear. If Danticat is looking to try to understand the
violence of Haiti from her perspective in the United States, her perspective
on Haiti also allows one to understand better the violence against others in
the United States. It is a viewpoint that ultimately seeks to counter a history
of U.S. desire to recreate Haiti in its own vision, by recognizing the ways in
which U.S. practices at home, against those it deems others, invoke reminders of a similar violence elsewhere. The reimagining of the United States is
as much a critical means of challenging our conception of the nation as it
is a means of recognizing how the United States as a nation is reimagining
itself in transnational terms.
Taken together, the essays collected here illustrate various segments of
the multitudinous ways in which cultural practices physically grounded in
the United States of America are impacted by, and construct, transnational
INTRODUCTION
flows, individual and collective. Imagined Transnationalism takes issue
with the multifaceted and often contradictory ways in which cultural realities today (but also in the past) have been seemingly disembedded from
any attachment or ground in the nation-state by processes of dislocation/
relocation, diaspora, migrancy and, as a consequence, have become as
mobile as the people that sustain them.
References
Bhabha, Homi K. 1996. Unsatisfied: Notes on Vernacular Cosmopolitanism.
In Text and Nation, ed. Laura Garcia-Morena and Peter C. Pfeifer, 191–207.
London: Camden House.
Bourne, Randolph. 1964. Trans-national America. In War and the Intellectuals:
Collected Essays 1915–1919, ed. Carl Resek, 107–123. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett
Publishing.
Briggs, Laura, Gladys McCormick, and J. T. Way. 2008. Transnationalism: A
Category of Analysis. American Quarterly 60.3: 625–648.
Falk, Richard. 1993. The Making of Global Citizenship. In Global Visions: Beyond
the New World Order, ed. Jeremy Brecher, John Brown Childs, and Jill Cutler,
39–50. Boston: South End Press.
García, Cristina. 1992. Dreaming in Cuban. New York: Ballantine Books.
Glick Schiller, Nina, Linda Basch, and Cristina Szanton Blanc. 1995. From Immigrant
to Transmigrant: Theorizing Transnational Migration. Anthropological Quarterly
68.1: 48–63.
O’Reilly Herrera, Andrea. ed. 2001. ReMembering Cuba: Legacy of a Diaspora.
Austin: University of Texas Press.
Rodriguez, Richard. 2002. Brown: The Last Discovery of America. New York:
Penguin.
Sassen, Saskia. 1991. The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo. Princeton: Princeton
University Press.
The editors would like to thank Gina Concannon and Miguel Jiménez for
their assistance in this project.
12
Chicano Transnation
Bill Ashcroft
I
n February 2008, during the Chinese New Year, when most Chinese
travel back to their families for the celebration, more than one million
Chinese migrant workers were stranded by snowstorms. Waiting for days at
train stations for the possibility of a rare train to their home village, many
of them did not move from the queue to eat or relieve themselves. This
number of people is more than the populations of a third of the member
states of the United Nations. But they were migrants and they were inside
their country. They were, to all intents and purposes, a diaspora. They
were away from home, within the nation. In India, more than double this
number of people are on the move at any one time on religious pilgrimages. Clearly these two nations may force us to rethink the concept of
nation as an imagined community in any but the most iconic sense.
But what does this have to do with the situationf Chicano/as today? The
link lies in the word “nation.” The reason for invoking China and India is
that their very size forces us to reconsider the relationship between culture
and nation, indeed to reconsider the existence of the “nation,” which,
since the rise of globalization studies has been relegated to the status of an
absent structure. But these meganations reveal something that is true for
all nations: that the nation—held captive by the state as a homogeneous
focus of identity, a bordered entity with its own integral relationship with
other similarly constituted nation-states—is in fact a transitional, fluid
interaction of nations and identities. In short, the nation is a transnation.
This observation moves to center stage in Chicano/a life because the fight
for self-determination has been led by an insurgent nationalism, driven to
a large extent by a specific utopianism centered on Aztlán but committed
to a concept of the nation within the state. China may be characterized
as not only a multination state but as an empire parading as a nation, in
1
BILL ASHCROFT
which state propaganda vigorously propounds loyalty to the nation-state.
As many commentators have suggested, this is not unlike the multinational state of the United States. But the concept of the multinational state,
while separating the idea of the nation from that of the state, is still hampered by an incipient nationalism. The concept of the transnation aligns
the actual disparity of intrastate nations with their fluid and transitional
character—it frees them from borders.
In this essay I want to explore ways in which the idea of Chicano
nationalism with its energetic history and practical disappointments may
be reconceived in terms of transnation. By the term “transnation” I mean
something more than “the international” or “the transnational,” terms that
might be conceived as denoting a relation or a crossing between states.
Transnation is the fluid, metaphorically, migrating outside of the state that
begins within the nation. This is possibly most obvious in India, where the
“nation” is the perpetual scene of translation; but translation is but one
example of the movement, the “betweenness” by which the subjects of the
transnation are constituted. It is the “inter”—the cutting edge of translation and renegotiation, the in-between space—that carries the burden of
the meaning of culture. In the context of Chicano/a culture, it also refers
to the presence of various “nations” within the state. When we consider
these “nations” as transnations, we may well see them as more empowered
than cultural minorities. Nevertheless, the transnation does not refer to
an object in political space. It is a way of talking about subjects in their
ordinary lives, subjects who live in-between the categories by which subjectivity is normally constituted.
The concept of the transnation therefore contests three things: the idea
that the nation is an integral, imagined whole; the idea that the nation
and the state are synonymous; and the idea that diasporas are necessarily
outside the nation, characterized by absence and loss. But it also offers an
alternative to the present buzzword of cosmopolitanism. I steer clear of the
term “cosmopolitan” because it is both an essentially transatlantic word
that refocuses attention back on the metropolitan center and one complicated by overtones of urbanity and sophistication. Cosmopolitanism has
nothing to say about that enormous number of Chinese migrant workers
waiting at train stations, nor has it anything to say about the Chicano
transnation. In general, it seems to have nothing to say about the so-called
Global South either. It is a useful term for describing the social dynamics of an urban, multicultural society, but it is essentially static in that it
describes social relations in the polis. Transnation captures the fluidity
of national subjects moving within and between the borders of the state.
The term “transnation,” while it pivots on a critique of the nation, and a
utopian projection beyond the tyranny of national identity, nevertheless
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acknowledges that people live in nations, and when they move, they do
so within and beyond nations. But the term separates the nation from the
state, and thus emphasizes its transitivity.
The one thing the term “transnation” does share with cosmopolitanism
is the sense of hope for what Paul Gilroy calls a “convivial multicultural
democracy” (from Latin con, meaning “with,” and vivere, meaning “live”).
The kind of society we discover beyond borders is a society in which interaction, difference, movement, and social complexity may be considered
to be the norm. Gilroy’s aim is to see whether multicultural diversity can
be combined with a hospitable civic order (2004, 1), whether a convivial
acceptance of difference might be achieved in a different kind of convivial
multicultural democracy than the examples presently available, particularly in Britain. A key moment in the book comes when he considers
Freud’s rejection, in Civilization and its Discontents, of Christ’s admonition
to “love thy neighbor as thyself.” Not all men, Freud concludes, are worthy
of love (Gilroy 2004, 72). But Gilroy responds:
I want to dispute his explicit rejection of the demand to practice an undifferentiated attitude toward friends and enemies, intimates and strangers,
alike. . . I want to explore ways in which the ordinary cosmopolitanism so
characteristic of postcolonial life might be sustained and even elevated.
(Gilroy 2004, 80)
Gilroy’s position relies on “a planetary consciousness” in which the
world “becomes not a limitless globe, but a small, fragile and finite place,
one planet among others with strictly limited resources that are allocated unequally” (2004, 83). On such a planet the injunction to “love thy
neighbor as thyself,”—an undifferentiated attitude toward friends and
enemies, including mutual respect, fellow feeling, and consideration—
might become a necessity rather than a vain hope. This, at least for Gilroy,
is worth exploring.
It is worth exploring for our purposes as well, because the thing that
such utopianism brings is a way out of despair, a way out of the trap
of national boundaries, a way toward a sense of possibility. Transnation
opens up the possibility of nations within and through nation-states.
Gilroy poses the idea of imperial melancholia as the opposite of this convivial democracy, and we run the danger of presenting the transnation as
always convivial, ignoring the plight into which globalization has thrown
people disadvantaged by class, ethnicity, war, tyranny, and all of the many
reasons why they may need to escape to another country. Therefore, we
might see the transnational subject as perhaps both melancholically and
productively “free” at the same time. The fascinating characteristic of
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BILL ASHCROFT
post-colonial transnations, one shared by many Chicano/as, is the presence of an abiding utopianism that is both mythic and sacred in origin
but which offers a symbolic anchor to identity in the fluid, between space
of the transnation.
Given that we can never shake ourselves free of the nation, the idea of
transnation is built on the possibility of a national citizen being at the same
time a transnational subject. The genuinely utopian possibility this presents
is that of a “transnational citizen.” The closest thing we have to this transnational citizen/subject may be a member of the second-generation diaspora,
who offers the most interesting possibilities of the liberating ambivalence
of diasporic subjectivity. But when we consider the example of the Chicano
transnation, we may discover a deep extension of this, when the second,
third, and fourth generation each finds itself born into a transcultural
space. These generations can say, in the words of a song by Los Tigres del
Norte, “I didn’t cross the border, the border crossed me.” Borders continue
to cross the transnational subject born into competing ideologies. The borders from which we might be free are therefore not simply the boundaries
of the nation but those of nation-ness, and ultimately of identity itself. It is
the strange contrapuntal relationship between identity, history, and nation
that needs to be unraveled. It is disrupted in many ways in post-colonial
literatures, but one way that interests me is the way it is unraveled in a different kind of relationship, that of memory and place: memory rather than
nostalgia, and place rather than nation. Utopianism takes cultural memory
and turns it into what Eduardo Glissant calls a “prophetic vision of the
past” (1989, 64). Glissant is talking here about history and such a vision
enters the allegory of history to re-vision the future. Such a re-visioning is
a critical feature of post-colonial literatures—generated by the meeting of
cultural memory and anticipatory consciousness.
1. Aztlán as Utopia
My interest in Chicano/a literature emerged from the importance of Aztlán
and its relationship with the utopianism that is widespread in other postcolonial societies. Examples of these utopian formations include Oceania
in the Pacific, Rastafarianism in the Caribbean, Pharaonic Africa, the religious profusion of the Indian mythic past, and various forms of possibility thinking from other regions. Although utopia is usually dismissed as
a vain fantasy, Ernst Bloch shows, in his magisterial The Principle of Hope
(1986), that future thinking, what he calls “anticipatory consciousness,” is
fundamental to human life. The critical fact of post-colonial societies is that
without a sense of hope for the future, a utopian vision of possibility, the
liberatory impulse, is doomed to wither. The Chicano version of utopian
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thinking, the Aztlán myth, proved to be a surprisingly resilient weapon in
the Chicano/a political arsenal because it so comprehensively united ethnicity, place, and nation. It differs from other post-colonial utopias because it
combined the mythic and the political so directly: on the one hand, it was
a spiritual homeland, a sacred place of origin; on the other, it generated
a practical (if impossible) goal of reconquering the territories taken from
Mexico. But this union of sacred and political proved to be its secret power.
The pronouncement of El Plan Espiritual de Aztlán at the First Chicano
National Conference in Denver in 1969 confirmed three important things:
a Chicano ethnicity, a homeland, and a nation. Chicano ethnicity could
now be seen to be grounded in Aztec origins; its homeland was now identified as the territory ceded to the United States by Mexico in the Treaty
of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848; that homeland was also accorded Chicano
ownership because the land belongs to those who work it, who “plant the
seeds, water the fields, and gather the crops”; and Chicano nationality was
now focused in the location, mythology, and significance of Aztlán: “We
are a nation, we are a union of free pueblos, we are Aztlán.” In short, Aztlán
became a focus for Chicano cultural and political identity and a permanent confirmation of the possibility of cultural regeneration.
The concept of La Raza, or “the bronze race,” theorized by José
Vasconcelos as an explanation of Chicano ethnicity seems at first to be a
rather ambivalent assertion of identity since it taps into the same kind of
eugenic discourse generated by the racialism that justified European imperialism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It attempts to take the
myth of white superiority head on by asserting its own superiority. This
is quite ironic since the name of the place with which Chicano ethnicity
became identified—Aztlán—means “whiteness.” However, its difference
lies in the fact that it takes the reality of hybridity or mestizaje as a genetic
and environmental strength. This directly contested the prejudice against
“racial impurities” and “contamination” that characterized colonial discourse, locating the strength of La Raza not in genetics but in place. La Raza,
then, is a resistant discourse much like the Negritude movement arising in
Francophone Africa in the 1930s or the “black is beautiful” movement in the
United States in the 1960s. Its distinctive feature is not so much that it provides a theory of racial identity for mestizos, but that it locates that identity
in the borderlands of the Southwest, in the geographical space of Aztlán.
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2. Chicano Nationalism
The more significant development from the cultural renaissance of the
1960s and 1970s is the emergence of Chicano nationalism. If Aztlán had
become a vague utopia by the twentieth century, the situation changed
BILL ASHCROFT
radically in the 1960s when it became the symbol of a Chicano nation.
Aztlán became synonymous with the territory of the U.S. Southwest, a
spiritual homeland that lay within the grasp of a determined nationalist
program, a “mestizo nation” that had both a geography and a history. In
this way the myth was transformed into a living dimension of Chicano/a
life. Myths are stories that are neither true nor untrue, but are narratives
that explain the cosmic structure of that culture’s world. Sacred myths in
particular are important in post-colonial utopianism because they become
the horizon of the culture’s world, and particularly the horizon of hope.
The myth of Aztlán functions to provide identity, location, and meaning
for a people who were previously scattered, directionless, and politically
unorganized. This myth, as with myths in all cultures, became an essential
dimension of their everyday experience. Aztlán has a place, it has a history,
and most importantly it apprehends a future.
However, as an imaginative feature of the rise of nationalism, utopianism carries dangers. In The Wretched of the Earth, Frantz Fanon launches
into a discussion that has a direct bearing on the relation between Aztlán
and nationalism, and on the liberatory function of utopianism itself, when
he mentions the strategy of “looking back” to Aztec culture as a way of
looking forward. The problem in essence is that utopianism may lull a
group into inaction. While, as Fanon suggests, it may have been necessary for Chicanos to “renew contact once more with the oldest and most
pre-colonial springs of life of their people” (1963, 209), the danger always
exists that rather than allowing the mythic past to generate empowering
cultural narratives, utopianism may lead to a kind of limp and nostalgic
romanticism. The claim “to a national culture in the past . . . [may] serve as
a justification for the hope of a future national culture,” and such renewed
contact with the “pre-colonial springs of life” provides a “psycho affective
equilibrium . . . responsible for an important change in the native” (1963:
210), one that may lead to political resurgence and liberation. But it also
involves dangers that Fanon warns may well end in forms of exoticism and
romantic idealizations of the past, which, rather than furthering the material struggle, lead to its bogging down in dreams and delusions of a past
grandeur. The tendency to idealize the past must be qualified; otherwise,
the material aims of the group may indeed be led astray by idle dreams
and empty symbols.
As we may see repeatedly in post-colonial discourse, however, without
the heroic dreams and cultural symbols generated by utopian hope, the
material aims of a nationalist movement may lack the spiritual center that
sustains struggle. In most post-colonial movements, the drive for a homeland, the dream of a liberated future, however illusory, obtains its power
from its sacred nature, and is to a great degree inspired by literature and art
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of various kinds, within which a different kind of future is best imagined.
Thus, despite materialist criticism of the place of cultural mythology, the
vision of a utopian future in literature fixes the hope for that future in the
cultural imagination. Whatever effect it may have on the immediate success or otherwise of political resistance, the spiritual sustenance of utopias
such as the myth of Aztlán is inestimable, a sacred dimension that continues to be generated in art and literature. This sacred dimension shared by
Aztlán with other post-colonial utopias appears to be the one thing that
can preserve hope against discouragement.
There is an interesting aspect of this question of Chicano nationalism,
which has to do with the severance of the ties between the nation and the
state. Nation and state are usually regarded as synonymous in the discourse of modernity. Post-colonial theory tends to critique nationalism,
since its energy and promise in uniting people to anticolonial resistance
inevitably degenerated, or became absorbed, into colonial-generated state
structures, often characterized by authoritarianism or corruption, or both.
However, we see from such huge and complex state societies as the United
States, China, and India that the “nation” is actually a transnation, the idea
of “nation” severed from clear identification with the state, except in times
of pronounced state propaganda. Most commentators regard communities such as Chicano/as as oppressed national minorities forming part of a
multinational state, rather than nations. However, the broad acceptance of
the term “First Nations” has provided a conceptual basis for considering
the presence of intrastate nations.
Whether groups such as Chicano/as can be considered as nations
raises broader questions of strategy, which Jorge Klor de Alva outlines in
a Marxist context. Assuming that nationalism is a foremost organizational
tool, he suggests that deploying nationalism raises several questions:
What should be the goal of national liberation: Political autonomy? Effective
political representation through electoral strategies? Or should the demand for
self determination be primarily a call for cultural autonomy, with local control
of schools and bilingual-bicultural education? Chicano and Puerto Rican
strategists are not in agreement as to what the right answers are. For those who
do not apply mechanically Stalin’s criteria for nationhood (common territory,
language, psychology, and economy) or who accept with a critical eye Lenin’s
theories on the subject, nationalism can mean many things: it can be political,
economic, or cultural. But to what extent it truly can be of one sort without
implying another is a crucial question; even though here as in the case of the
question concerning the right to self determination material, objective conditions, rather than theoretical expertise, ultimately determine the answer.
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(Klor de Alva 1988, 143)
BILL ASHCROFT
Whatever that answer might be, we can see that the strategy involves the
constant risk of essentializing and reifying a people into the particular
kind of imagined community that is called a “nation.” While the myth of
Aztlán may have led to a vital sense of identification in Chicano culture,
and while the idea of an intrastate national identity has a proven utility in
identity politics, the formalization of a Chicano nation, based on the territory of the Southwest, is almost certainly bound to be fruitless.
3. Nation to Transnation: A Borderland Subjectivity
The solution to this may be that the Chicano nation be construed as a
transnation. The idea of a transnation disrupts and scatters the construct
of center and periphery, which continues, after Wallerstein, to maintain
its hold on our understanding of the structure of global relations. But it
also disrupts the implicit homogenizing force of the nation within state
boundaries. If we think of the transnation as extending beyond the geographical, cultural, religious, and imaginative boundaries of the state, both
within and beyond the boundaries of the nation-state, we discover it as a
space in which those boundaries are disrupted, in which national and cultural affiliations are superseded, in which binaries of center and periphery,
national self and other, are dissolved.
Interestingly, a ready-made conceptual framework already exists for
this in Chicano/a geography in the term “borderlands.” This sets the scene
for a concept of subjectivity as in-betweenness that goes beyond the reifying effects of national identity. This state of borderlands existence helps
to redefine the subject. The transnation is an in-between space, which
contains no singular, definitive people, nation, or even community, but
is everywhere, a space without boundaries. The term “in-betweenness”
circumvents the problematic, organic nature of that most contentious
term—“hybridity.” It also approximates the actual contingent and liminal
state of all contemporary subjects. It is perhaps nowhere more present
than in the concept of mestizo or mestizaje, but it can also embrace a wide
range of transcultural engagements, as it has in Chicano/a writing.
The transcultural impetus of Chicano/a culture resists the power of
“internal colonization.” This is often thought to be outside the scope of
a post-colonial reading, an incorrect assumption that arises from a misunderstanding of the term “post-colonial.” “Post-colonial” doesn’t mean
“after colonialism” but refers to the way colonized writers and cultural
producers engage the imperial discourses to which they are subject. This
applies in most cases to those engagements that occur within the historical
period of colonization but continue into the present. The “post-colonial”
begins with colonization, not with independence. Indeed “post-colonial”
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21
does not refer to a state of being at all but is a way of reading, a way of
talking about those engagements.
One of the most vigorous of these post-colonial engagements in all
colonized societies occurs in language. This is particularly evident in the
former colonies of the British Empire. The English language was held to be
a supremely potent technology of civilization, and English literature was virtually invented as an academic subject to civilize the colonies (Viswanathan
1987; 1989). This had most unexpected consequences: colonials forced to
learn the English language and literature learned to transform the language
and create their own literatures. Hybrid and adapted forms of English transformed the language itself (Ashcroft 2008), offering a strategic intervention
in the construction of identity that remains relevant to the complex nature
of Chicano subjectivity. Alfred Arteaga claims:
I define myself as a Chicano . . . My nation is not Mexico, yet I am ethnically
Mexican and racially mestizo. But my people exist in the borderlands that
traverse the national frontiers of the United States and Mexico. It is obvious for us here that the language we speak both reflects and determines our
position in relation to the two nations.
(Arteaga 1994, 3–4)
In literature and other forms of cultural production, this in-betweenness
can be a form of strength. The relation between the two nations can be
one emerging from and confirming the Chicano transnation. Rather
than diluting cultural identity, linguistic versatility and adaptability can
confirm it. This is true of all post-colonial literatures, which produce
hybrid narrative strategies such as code-switching, glossing, syntactic
fusion, untranslated words, all of which function both to hybridize and to
distance, to communicate while establishing difference. This establishes a
metonymic gap in which the transformed language is synecdochic of the
writer’s culture (Ashcroft 2008, 174).
Chicano/a developments of hybrid language strategies uncover an
example of the felt experience of nation existing outside, or beneath, the
racial and historical narrative of the nation-state. In this existence in the
borderlands of the state, the use of language is not only a central fact but
also an empowering technology for self-fashioning. The example of the
borderlands’ culture is important because it reveals a truth about all languages: that while identity is usually held to reside in language, identity
is actually performed in the range of different ways the language is used.
Perhaps the exponent of in-betweenness par excellence is Gloria Anzaldúa,
whose Borderlands/La Frontera crosses, or subverts, borders of nationality,
ethnicity, gender, geography, and history.
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BILL ASHCROFT
The issue of Chicano land, Chicano space, and the borderlands raises
the associated issue of Chicano colonization and why we are justified
in seeing Chicano resistance as a post-colonial movement. The border
between the United States and Mexico is one of the longest between
any two countries, some 3,000 kilometers from Tijuana-San Ysidro to
Brownsville-Matamoros. The fact that seems to have disappeared from
U.S. history is that this border is a consequence of the invasion and colonization of the inhabitants of North Mexico. Like many of America’s colonies, such as Hawaii and Puerto Rico, North Mexico was absorbed into the
state of the United States, but in the case of Mexico, both the origin and
process of that absorption disappeared from official and popular memory.
In 1846 the United States provoked Mexico to war, the result of which was
the invasion of Mexico and the annexation of Texas, New Mexico, Arizona,
Colorado, and California. The border fence that now divides the United
States and Mexico was created, in effect, on February 2, 1848, when the
Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, annexing those states, left 100,000 Mexican
citizens on the U.S. side. This puts a very different slant on the hysteria surrounding illegal immigration and border protection in the United States
today. Land established by the Treaty as belonging to Mexicans was soon
swindled away and the mestizo inhabitants originally working the land
were by and large dispossessed.
The borderlands therefore carry a meaning dense with history, belonging, and cultural identity. If we consider the borderlands to include all the
territories taken from Mexico, it is an extensive region, a space of intense
interaction, a contact zone like no other. As Gloria Anzaldúa writes, the
“chainlink fence crowned with rolled barbed wire,” what some call a
“Tortilla curtain,” is an “open wound” some 1,950 miles long. Such a line
divides a people and their culture on both sides of the border. But it is not
just a border in space, it is a lived border “running down the length of my
body” splitting her very being. Yet this splitting, “this thin edge of barbed
wire,” is home, and the utopian hope of an ancestral home in the future, a
memory of the future, which Anzaldua shares with so much post-colonial
writing, is captured in the lines: “This land was Mexican once, / was Indian
always / and is. / And will be again” (Anzaldúa 1988, 193). The Chicano/a
identity, split by the open wound of the border running down her body,
must be continually reconciled in the vision of a utopian future provided
by the myth of Aztlán.
Borders are the classic instrument of othering. But they also correspondingly homogenize those within them:
22
Borders are set up to define places that are safe and unsafe, to distinguish
us from them. A border is a dividing line, a narrow strip along a steep edge.
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23
A borderland is a vague and undetermined place created by the emotional
residue of an unnatural boundary. It is in a constant state of transition. The
prohibited and forbidden are its inhabitants.
Therefore, Chicano/a literature has repeatedly transformed that ambivalent and often outcast space into a space of affirmation and possibility
through the myth of Aztlán with its powerful fusion of the sacred, historical, geographical, and political. The border, which divides, has been
replaced by the borderlands, which, ironically, dissolve borders.
4. Borderlands, Diaspora, and Smooth Space
The borderlands may therefore be characterized by extension rather than
enclosure. Sergio Elizondo makes the point that the Chicano/a population
between the border and mid-America should not be regarded as a diaspora
but as a continuation of the expanding population of the borderland:
[T]he mere physical extension between the U.S. Mexico border and, let
us say, Chicago, is a fact of human dispersion, and not a diaspora of the
Chicano people. It is not static for us, but rather it has always been a
dynamic and natural motion motivated by laws and processes common to
all cultures. Our migrations north of the old historical border have extended
the geography and social fabric of Aztlán northward in all directions; we
have been able to expand our communal life and fantasies.
(Elizondo 1988, 206)
We might add that in an enormous region covering five states, many
Chicano/as are still living in their ancestral homeland. However, this may
be the secret power of the borderlands’ concept—because they are interstitial, they cannot be bounded. The Chicano/a population is not a scattering, nor a diaspora, but rather the occupants of an expanding cultural
space. This space may be called Aztlán, but it is an Aztlán that has taken on
a radically different form.
This form is that of the transnation, which contests the central assumption of diaspora studies that diasporic populations are characterized by
absence and loss. This may appear to overlook the great number of people
who have been exiled from a sense of home. In Paul Gilroy’s terms, we may
appear to be in danger of assuming that all migratory populations are all
“convivial” rather than “melancholic” (Gilroy 2004). But on the contrary,
whether a refugee in the most perilous of circumstances, or the migrant
(Anzaldúa 1988, 194; emphasis original)
BILL ASHCROFT
worker exploited and underpaid in the Southwest, or the middle-class cultural producer who feels at home in global travel, all subjects of the transnation have access to the agency accorded by the ability to move between
the structures of the state. The critical revelation of the transnation is that
exile begins within the nation: it does not begin once borders have been
crossed. The mobility and in-betweenness of the transnation injects the
principle of hope into the equation.
We can think of those borders within which the Chicano/a subject is born
in terms of the relation between the transnation and the state, and a brilliant
metaphor for this relationship is Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s concept
of “smooth space.” This is the space of the transnation that the Chicano/a
subject shares with the rhizomic interplay of traveling subjects within
and between nations. The transnation exists within, beyond, and between
nation-states. It is a collectivity comprised of communities that may be
drawn in one way or another to the myth of a particular nation-state, but
who draw away perpetually into the liberating region of in-betweenness.
The distinction between “smooth space” and “striated space” seems odd
at first, but Deleuze and Guattari explain it with a very concrete image:
the contrast between a woven textile and felt. A textile fabric is composed
of interwoven vertical and horizontal components, warp and woof, a
delimited and organized structure that Plato used as a paradigm for royal
science, “the art of governing people or operating the state’s apparatus”
(Deleuze and Guattari 2004, 475). Felt, on the other hand, is a supple solid,
more like an “anti-fabric.” It is an entanglement of fibers rather than a
weave, one obtained by rolling the block of fibers back and forth, entangling, rather than weaving them. “An aggregate intrication of this kind,” they
say, “is in no way homogeneous: it is nevertheless smooth” (2004, 475).
Smooth space, for Deleuze and Guattari, contrasts with “striated space”
or ordered space. Yet, smooth space is not separate from striated space.
Smooth space takes form when the striated space of government institutions, fixed concepts, and essentialized peoples are broken into their
composing forces, caught up in a swirling whirlpool that is capable of
mixing these forces in new ways to produce monsters that may defy the
categorizing machines of the institutions of striated space. It is the possibility that new and different kinds of subjects and spaces may emerge—a
people and a nation yet to be known—that makes smooth space a space of
potentiality. Smooth space indeed expresses a great intensity or depth that
is beyond the measures of governed divisions, like the division of labor
between thinking and acting, theory and practice.
The smooth space does not distinguish the global from the local for it is
found in both and in the interaction between them. Diasporas, both internal and external, become the inhabitants of smooth space. Deleuze and
24
CHICANO TRANSNATION
25
Even the most striated city gives rise to smooth spaces: to live in the city as a
nomad, or as a cave dweller. Movements, speed and slowness, are sometimes
enough to reconstruct a smooth space. Of course smooth spaces are not
in themselves liberatory. But the struggle is changed or displaced in them,
and life reconstitutes its stakes, confronts new obstacles, invents new paces,
switches, adversaries.
(Deleuze and Guattari 2004, 500)
Deleuze, like Michel de Certeau in The Practice of Everyday Life (1984),
seems naturally drawn to the image of the city as the site of a relation
between smooth and striated space. While the city is a clearly striated
physical space, the “space” of the state is constituted within the striated
structure of its laws, institutions, its governing structures, and even cultural expectations and racial orientations that emerge, for instance, in
legislation on language policy. The smooth space is that space of the transnation that exists alongside, between, and even within the striated space of
the state. It is constituted in such things as hybrid language, transformed
literary and cultural productions, and the many ways in which people circulate around, in, and through the structures of the state. As we see in the
passage above, Deleuze and Guattari avoid the utopian move that might
see in smooth space, and its concomitants, the people who exist between,
in, and around the institutions of administrative power, as a dimension of
liberation. “Never believe that a smooth space will suffice to save us,” they
conclude (Deleuze and Guattari 2004, 500). Indeed, smooth space is also
the space of globalization. It is the space of the affects of neoliberal utopias,
the space in which ordinary subjects are drawn, regardless of the attachment to nation, to the subjectivity of capitalist consumption. Yet, by its
very existence, the smooth space of the transnation challenges, because it
mostly ignores, exceeds, surrounds, and interpenetrates the striated space
of the state. It is not in itself liberatory, but it is the medium of liberation.
While Deleuze and Guattari use the concrete example of the city, smooth
space is eminently suited to theorizing the geographical and cultural borderlands, which Chicano/a culture has adopted as its own.
Guattari use the physical metaphor of the city to demonstrate the relation
between the striated and the smooth:
5. Transnation as Borderland Heterotopia
The constitution of the Chicano “nation” as a transnation has a corresponding impact in Chicano mythology. If the Chicano nation is a utopian idea,
BILL ASHCROFT
the Chicano transnation is a reality. That transnation occupies a “real,”
although fluid, site based in the partially desacralized and unbounded
space of the borderlands. To conceptualize this, Foucault’s notion of heterotopias, which he outlines in “Of Other Spaces” (1967), may be useful.
Unlike utopias, heterotopias are real sites. Society designates sites for work,
for recreation, for rest, for education, for transportation, and so on. But
Foucault is interested in counter-sites, places positioned on the outside
of cultural space, irrelevant to the practical functioning of everyday life.
These are real places but “absolutely different” from other sites: not utopias
but “heterotopias.” They can be disruptive, as he suggests in the preface
to The Order of Things: while “Utopias afford consolation: although they
have no real locality there is nevertheless a fantastic, untroubled region
in which they are able to unfold”; heterotopias, on the other hand “are
disturbing, probably because they secretly undermine language” (Foucault
1970, xviii). If we think of the transnation as an unbounded site, a “smooth
space” but a real site, a site of extension rather than enclosure, we can see
how disruptive its potential may be to state structures and their socially
designated sites.
If we can accept the fact that utopias—placeless places—are strongly
imbued with the idea of the sacred, a fact that emerges in virtually all
post-colonial utopias, then heterotopias are partially desacralized spaces.
We may also see this partial desanctification in political utopianism itself,
which never seems to discard nor appears to want to discard the sacred
(although it may be variously defined), because this always emerges as
an element of cultural identity. The relationship between utopia, with its
sacred imaginary, and heterotopia, with its sacred trace, is comprehensively embodied in the metaphor of the mirror:
The mirror is, after all, a utopia, since it is a placeless place. In the mirror,
I see myself there where I am not, in an unreal, virtual space that opens up
behind the surface . . . But it is also a heterotopia in so far as the mirror does
exist in reality, where it exerts a sort of counteraction on the position that
I occupy.
(Foucault 1967, 24)
26
This seems to capture perfectly the metonymic relation Foucault is striving
for in the apparent contrast between the sacred space, the placeless place
of the utopian, and the real, yet only partially desacralized, reflection of
that utopia in the heterotopia. Like the mirror, the transnation is both an
imagined place—imagined most powerfully in literature in the symbol
of Aztlán—and a real place occupied by real people, a transformed and
inhabited Aztlán, a smooth space.
27
We can see therefore that the partially desacralized space of the borderlands, seen now not as a bounded site but as a fluid space, is the space of
the transnation. But in case we are tempted to revert to an idea of the borderlands as a region occupied by the nation, let us remember the principle
of smooth space. The beauty of the concept of the borderlands is their
very interstitiality, their borderlessness. Like the transnation they operate
between and through the political and geographic striations of the state.
They are a real but unbounded site.
One of the primary figures in the resurgence of Aztlán in the 1970s was
Rudolfo Anaya, whose Heart of Aztlán (1976) offered a powerful fusion
of the mythic and the political, the sacred and the national. In an essay
he wrote in 1988, he suggests that now, having had its impact in Chicano
resurgence, Aztlán should be considered as a “homeland without boundaries.” Anaya sees not just ethnicity but the idea of the nation-state itself, with
its obsessive patrolling of the shadow lines of its borders, as something that
needs to be transcended. For him, Aztlán is not just a myth but the promise of “a more fulfilling and harmonious future” (Anaya 1988, 241).
“How is it possible,” we might ask, “to live in a way that might escape
the borders of nation, maps and memory?” Because however illusory
and arbitrarily established the borders of the state may be, they insist on
their function as rigid constructors of identity. The Chicano transnation,
impelled by the utopian myth of Aztlán, identifies the smooth space of the
borderlands as a heterotopia. The transnation is an imagined community,
occupying a partially desacralized space, the smooth space in between,
around, and through the structures of the state. Like Foucault’s metaphor
of the mirror, it is a spectral contact zone, reflecting the continual possibilities of negotiation, transformation, and change. These possibilities are
those of the borderlands, which ironically dissolve borders, and perhaps
confirm the possibility that lies at the heart of the transnation—a homeland without boundaries.
References
Anaya, Rudolfo. 1976. Heart of Aztlán. Berkeley: Editorial Justa.
———. 1988. Aztlán: A Homeland without Boundaries. In Aztlán: Essays on
the Chicano Homeland, ed. Rudolfo Anaya and Francisco Lomelí, 230–241.
Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.
Anzaldúa, Gloria. 1988. The Homeland Aztlán / El Otro México. In Aztlán: Essays
on the Chicano Homeland, ed. Rudolfo Anaya and Francisco Lomelí, 191–204.
Arteaga, Alfred. 1994. An Other Tongue: Nation and Ethnicity in the Linguistic
Borderlands. Durham: Duke University Press.
CHICANO TRANSNATION
BILL ASHCROFT
Ashcroft, Bill. 2008. Caliban’s Voice: The Transformation of English in Post-Colonial
Literatures. London: Routledge.
Bloch, Ernst. 1986. The Principle of Hope, 3 vols., trans. Neville Plaice, Stephen
Plaice, and Paul Knight. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
de Certeau, Michel. 1984. The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven F. Randall.
Berkeley: University of California Press.
Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. 2004. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and
Schizophrenia, trans. B. Massumi. London: Continuum Books.
Elizondo, Sergio D. 1988. ABC: Aztlán the Borderlands and Chicago. In Aztlán:
Essays on the Chicano Homeland, ed. Rudolfo Anaya and Francisco Lomelí,
205–218. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.
Fanon, Frantz. 1963. The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington.
New York: Grove Press.
Foucault, Michel. 1967/1986. Of Other Spaces. Diacritics 16.1: 22–27.
———. 1970. The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences. London:
Tavistock.
Gilroy, Paul. 2004. After Empire: Melancholia or Convivial Culture. London:
Routledge.
Glissant, Edouard. 1989. Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays, trans. J. Michael
Dash. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia.
Klor de Alva, Jorge. 1988. Aztlán, Borinquen and Hispanic Nationalism in the
United States. In Aztlán: Essays on the Chicano Homeland, ed. Rudolfo Anaya
and Francisco Lomelí, 135–171. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico
Press.
Viswanathan, Gauri. 1987. The Beginnings of English Literary Study in British
India. Oxford Literary Review 9.1–9.2: 2–25.
———. 1989. Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India. New York:
Columbia University Press.
28
A Schematic Approach
to Understanding Latino
Transnational Literary Texts
Nicolás Kanellos
T
ransnationalism is a concept developed by social scientists in the 1990s
in order to understand the life and culture of people moving from one
place to another, especially during the latter part of the twentieth century.
The concept is often linked to another somewhat amorphous concept, that
of globalization or the creation of a global economy that has the effect of
uprooting populations. According to Linda Basch, Nina Glick Schiller, and
Cristina Szanton Blanc, the people they call “transmigrants” participate in
the nation-building projects of their land of origin and that of their receptor land, where they are often considered “immigrants” or “ethnics” (1993,
45–46). The concepts of transnationalism and transmigrants depart from
earlier postulations that saw immigrants as people who gave up their land of
origin in order to settle permanently in the host country—a popular concept
extrapolated from the settlement patterns of earlier European immigrants to
the United States, who were subjected to the pressures of the “Melting Pot”
and the “American Dream.” Transnationalism thus challenges the earlier
concept of assimilation to the host culture, as related to these two nationbuilding American myths, in favor of a model that goes beyond the limits of
political and geographic borders, languages, and national allegiances.
Obviously we must consider these concepts when studying U.S. Latino
literature, not only because the United States has been a destination for
transmigrants from Spanish America and Spain since the early nineteenth
century, but also because the geographic and political borders of the
United States expanded various times to incorporate Spanish-speaking
2
NICOLÁS KANELLOS
peoples whose relationship with the peoples of Spanish America may have
been closer than that with the American mainstream and its nationalization imaginary. In fact, thousands of archival documents, 18,000 books,
and 1,200 periodicals published before 1960 that we have gathered in the
“Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage Project”1 amply demonstrate how, by the end of the colonial period, the Hispanic peoples living
north of the Río Grande prior to and after U. S. expansion southward and
westward were never cut off from communications and intercourse with
the rest of the Spanish-speaking world; it was often this world and its panHispanic imaginary that provided the history, literature, and symbolism
to Latinos in the United States in their construction of national identity/
ies, even if that/those identity/ies were to be seen as existing within the
American national paradigm. Furthermore, these documents, especially
documents written and/or published in Spanish, demonstrate how the
flow of literary discourse was northward and southward as well as transCaribbean and trans-Atlantic (to Spain and back).
Therefore, if these realities are admitted, then we must examine some
persistent premises that have emerged among academics in the last thirty
or forty years, such as the Chicano Movement’s notion that the populations in the Southwest were bereft of a written tradition and literature
and, thus, the academy needed to focus on the collection and study of
oral lore. Or that Puerto Rican and Cuban letters in the United States are
a recent phenomenon, intimately tied to the post–World War II diasporas
brought about because of economic and political disruptions. Or Hispanic
communities in certain geographic areas of the United States have been
ethnically homogeneous and that we can study the literature and culture
of each group in isolation. Other premises reign today, and must be examined, such as those relating to English or Spanish language preference,
what constitutes literary creativity, and how political discourse and literary
creativity relate to each other. Most of all, the segregation of immigrant
literature from Chicano, Nuyorican, and Cuban American literatures must
end, for these literatures are all intimately connected to transmigrant culture and its literary expression; they must be seen on the continuum of
transnationalism.
In this chapter, I would like to propose a schema to illustrate the transnational dynamic of U.S. Latino literature from the 1800s to the present
(see fig. 2.1). The schema relies on the observation that there have been
three general trajectories of Latino expression in the United States since the
1800s: native, immigrant, and exile. Hispanic native culture and identity
developed among the descendants of the Spanish, Hispanicized Native
American, Hispanicized African, mestizo, and mulatto settlers under Spain
and later Mexico into areas stretching from Florida to Louisiana to Texas,
30
31
the Southwest, and West that would later be incorporated into the United
States. The literary expression created through generations by these groups
presents a common stock of perspectives, whether we talk about the Isleños
in Louisiana, the Floridians at the time of U.S. purchase, or the Californios
and Tejanos newly subjected to Anglo-American political and cultural
domination after 1848, the end of the war with Mexico: (1) an identity or
sense of place with their geographic location; (2) a sense of history rooted
in the Hispanic past; (3) a growing awareness of racial-cultural difference
and resistance to assimilation into the new Anglo-Protestant majority
overwhelming the native populations; (4) a sense of becoming a dislocated and oppressed minority within the new political-judicial-economic
arrangements resultant from losing wars or being literally purchased by
the United States; (5) despite all of the above, a sense of entitlement to
civil and cultural rights, not only as a result of treaties but also because
of their American citizenship. Most of these ideas were forged during the
late colonial period, before the United States actually took over, but certainly under the perception of threat from the expanding Anglo-American
empire during the first decades of the nineteenth century. On this base of
native culture and attitudes, the culture of economic refugees, one type of
transmigrant, and that of political refugees, another type of transmigrant,
planted themselves and grew, repeating certain patterns of thought and
interaction, one with the other, from the beginning of the nineteenth century to the present, and forging temporary and permanent relationships
not only with native Hispanics and the American mainstream but also
with their countries of origin. The economic and political refugees for the
most part located themselves where there were already large populations of
Spanish-speakers present, often native Hispanics with a long history in the
United States. Because of the geographic proximity of the United States to
their lands of origin, and because of the economic and political relations,
in particular the U.S. interventions in their homelands, the flow of Hispanic
transmigrants to the United States has been almost uninterrupted since the
early nineteenth century. And with each wave of arrivals, newer and more
up-to-date versions of culture from the lands of origin interacted with
the Hispanic native culture in the United States—and this phenomenon
continues to this date, perhaps even more powerfully through current technologies of travel and communications. That is not to say that the native
Hispanic populations were just receptors of more up-to-date or advanced
or evolved culture from the cultural capitals of Argentina, Cuba, Mexico,
Puerto Rico, or Spain. At each step it can be shown how the advanced
technology in the United States worked to the benefit of native Hispanic
populations—as well as that of the transmigrants—in delivering their perceptions and even imagined nationhood to Spanish America.2 Entire books
LATINO TRANSNATIONAL LITERARY TEXTS
NICOLÁS KANELLOS
have been written, for instance, on how Cuban nationhood was forged in
the nineteenth century, not on the island but in the native/transmigrant
communities in Key West, Tampa, and New York.3 And while the dream of
a United Spanish America may have been Simón Bolívar’s, countless native
and transmigrant writers and activists from the late nineteenth century on
furthered this dream from the shores of the United States. And calls for solidarity of Hispanic peoples from the U.S. Southwest to Tierra del Fuego in
confronting the Colossus of the North were issued long before José Martí’s
“Nuestra América” by such essayists as Francisco Ramírez in Los Angeles
(Kanellos 2006–2007, 15–16).
Thus, while it may be tempting to assign native, immigrant, or exile
status to particular writers and communities, the schema more accurately
relates to the texts that writers generate and the narrative stand that they
assume in these texts with regard to the United States and the land of origin. That is to say that an exiled writer is quite capable of writing from the
point of view of an immigrant in one instance and as a political refugee
in the next. Likewise, an immigrant in some texts may confront life in the
grand U.S. Metropolis; in the next, he may represent his culture as exiled,
as in El México de afuera (Baeza Ventura 2005); and in another text, he may
assume a native posture, because, after all, he has lived in the United States
for more than thirty years and has become a voting citizen, as was the case
32
Figure 2.1 Hispanic cultures in the United States
33
of Adolfo Carrillo (Leal 1992, 53–55). Returning to Francisco Ramírez,
although he was born and educated in California and was completely
bilingual—actually trilingual with his command of French—he wrote
as a native Californian while in Los Angeles, but then went into exile in
northern Mexico, where he experienced this dislocation and uprootedness
of the political refugee. He subsequently returned to California, where he
worked for San Francisco immigrant newspapers La Voz de México and El
Nuevo Mundo (Gray 2006–2007, 30–31).
Here, then, is the full schema and the analysis of each of the categories:
1. Native texts reveal an identity with the geographic location in the
United States. There is no question of return to a homeland; the
United States is the homeland. This is as true for the Californio
narratives and Tejano autobiographies in the nineteenth century as
it is for Nuyorican and Chicano literature today. Immigrant texts,
created by immigrants themselves, not their progeny, serve as a
bridge from the old country to the new. All immigrant texts have an
implicit binary of contrasting the land and culture left behind with
those encountered in the new land; this is true for physical and cultural referents as well as for language, religion, landscape, and a host
of other markers. Exile texts are usually directed to the homeland,
in expectation of effecting change or waiting for change to occur in
the homeland.
2. Native texts reveal an awareness and acceptance of the major American
beliefs; they position themselves as American, although perhaps
from a minority or marginal perspective. Immigrant literature
promotes a return to the homeland and, in so doing, is antihegemonic and rejecting of the “American Dream” and of the “Melting
Pot.” Immigrant literature, from the first immigrant novel, Alirio
Díaz Guerra’s Lucas Guevara, to Daniel Venegas’s Las aventuras de
Don Chipote to René Marqués’s La Carreta, proposes this return as
the only solution to dying physically or culturally—that is, losing
one’s identity and personality in the Metropolis. In addition, immigrant texts often assume the position of speaking to readers in the
homeland, warning them not to come to the United States, because
the mythic streets of gold are really paths to modern wage slavery,
indebtedness, and loss of identity. Exilic texts often see themselves
as engaged in the battle to change the governmental order in the
homeland, and are often not concerned with politics and culture
in the United States. As soon as their political cause has prevailed
or there is amnesty, the authors plan to return home and end their
exilic status.
NICOLÁS KANELLOS
Table 2.1
Textual characteristics of U.S. Hispanic literature
Native
Immigrant
Exile
Has sense of place in the
United States
Endorses life in the
United States as citizens
Is a bridge from old to
new country
Embodies dream of
return to the homeland
3.
Protests injustice and
effects cultural change in
the United States
4.
Struggles for civil and
human rights and
against racism
5.
Displays working-class
posture / popular culture
/ minority consciousness
6.
Characterized by cultural
synthesis, hybridization,
and new identities and
home spaces: Aztlán,
Loisaida, etc. A new
aesthetic
Represents culture
conflict and cultural
nationalism
Character types: new,
hybrid literary characters—pachucos and
vendidos
Exhibits desire to preserve the culture of the
homeland while living in
the United States
Struggles for human
rights and labor rights.
Protests racism and
exploitation
Displays working-class
culture of the majority
versus bourgeois posture of the minority of
immigrants
Characterized by the
illusion of cultural
purity, the colony
as temporary: Little
Mexicos, Little Havanas,
and Little San Juans
Represents nostalgic and
conservative nationalism
Only relates to the
homeland
Aspires for return to
the homeland when the
political situation has
changed
Does not exhibit or
support cultural change
1.
2.
7.
8.
9.
10.
Themes: identity crisis,
language and culture,
race-class-gender, community
Bildungsroman, autobiography
Character types: the
greenhorn, the flapper,
the agringado, the pocho,
the petit yanqui
Themes: the Metropolis,
the family, labor exploitation
Picaresque narratives,
road stories
Protests politics in the
homeland, colonialism,
dictatorships, etc.
Displays elite culture
Characterized by
cultural purity: exile
as Babylonian captivity, the homeland as
Paradise Lost; disillusionment
Involves political/
revolutionary nationbuilding
Character types: heroes,
epic and tragic figures,
dictators, revolutionaries and counter-revolutionaries
Themes: political
injustice, authoritarianism, etc.
34
Novels of the revolution, epic dramas and
polemic treatises, editorials and essays
35
3. Positioned as a literature of citizens with civil rights, native texts
protest the discrimination, marginalization, and dispossession
of Latinos in the United States. In addition, these texts exemplify
a desire to reform the national culture to be more equitable and
accepting of linguistic, cultural, and religious differences. Immigrant
texts promote an ideology of a Latino colony within the United
States, which must preserve the language, literature, and culture
of the homeland in order to resume the life they left behind when
the transmigrants are able to return home. Immigrant texts often
highlight and demonize symbols and representations of American
culture, such as the Metropolis itself, capitalism, and social mores
that represent threats to their own family, religious, and societal
arrangements, especially as related to the liberalized lives of women
and the incursions of Protestant conversions of Hispanic Catholics.
During the early twentieth century, for instance, the attacks on
American flappers were equally vitriolic in works by the Mexican
Julio B. Arce, the Cuban Alberto O’Farrill, and the Puerto Rican
Jesús Colón. (As Colón evolved more to the native position and
began writing in English, his attitudes towards American and Latina
women also became more liberal.) Exilic texts are not very concerned with American social arrangements other than that they
seem to be foreign and very strange to them; this is consonant with
their metaphor of sojourn in Babylon. Their only version of culture
is the one left behind in the homeland; their imagined nation can
be static, having become frozen in time beginning with the moment
of exile, or dynamic, envisioning a completely new and liberalized
social order or Utopia. Culture change, which is inevitable in the
homeland, is only rejected as deleterious and not at all authentic to
their imagined community. This, in fact, was taken to an extreme
for decades by Mexican exilic texts created during the Revolution;
they envisioned the México de afuera as the true Mexico and the
culture in the homeland some deformed and degraded version of
the national culture.4
4. As citizens, Latinos are entitled to civil rights protected by the
Constitution, and they do not suffer the threat of deportation if
they protest inequities or injustices. Their texts reveal these entitlements as well as others accruing to citizens. This empowers authors
to use texts in the battle to reform society and make it live up to
the principles of equality and protection under the laws that are
codified in the national charter. Immigrants or economic refugees,
whether documented or not, do not feel they have the rights of citizens, and their texts, instead of protesting the lack of civil rights and
NICOLÁS KANELLOS
exposing themselves to deportation or further persecution, protest
in Spanish the exploitation and oppression in industry and discrimination in the society. This stance of marginality and implicit protest
are evident from Don Chipote to Mario Bencastro’s Odisea del Norte.
In addition, many of the economic refugees worked historically in
railroad construction and maintenance in the Southwest, steel mills
in the Midwest, tobacco factories in Florida, and manufacturing
plants in the Northeast. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries, they became advocates of unions as well as students and
promoters of anarchism, socialism, and communism—and, indeed,
some were arrested, deported, or imprisoned for long terms. Many
of their anarchist and radical texts eschewed nationalism in favor
of uniting the working classes and revolutionizing society. The
workers’ texts themselves were used for these purposes, from those
published by the Mexican Villarreal sisters to the Sephardic Daniel
De León to Puerto Rican Luisa Capetillo to Luis Valdez during the
Chicano Movement.
Exilic texts are often polemic, attacking the government in the
homeland and protesting against the colonial administration, dictatorship, and totalitarianism. The numbers of these texts read like
a political history of Spain and Spanish America, from attacks on
the King of Spain in El laúd del desterrado to attacks on Francisco
Franco in Lirón’s Bombas de mano and Leopoldo González’s Abajo
Franco, from protests against Augusto Pinochet’s, the Argentine
generals’, and Evita Perón’s regimes in Ariel Dorfman’s La muerte y
la doncella to Tomás Eloy Martínez’s Santa Evita.
5. Due to what historians consider the “proletarization” (Mirandé
1987, 27–49) of the native Hispanic population of the Southwest
with the advent of the Anglos in the mid-nineteenth century and
the overwhelmingly working-class culture of the majority of the
economic refugees from the Mexican Revolution and the Puerto
Rican and Central American diasporas in the twentieth century,
the majority of native and immigrant texts and oral literature has
represented a working-class perspective, with its attendant reliance
on oral and folk modes of transmission, as well as what Walter Ong
calls secondary and residual oralities in written texts (1982, 37–57).
Not only the Mexican corridos and the Puerto Rican décimas of
immigration, but also such vaudeville sketches as Netty and Jesús
Rodríguez’s Me voy pa’ México and Una mula de tantas and the
Tampa cigar rollers’ labor agitprop plays, such as Vivan las Caenas,
and the novels of immigration mentioned above, explicitly display
working-class language, sensibility, and organizing ideology, just as
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37
would the Chicano and Nuyorican writers from the 1960s through
the 1980s.
From the texts of José María Heredia and Félix Varela to the writings of Reinaldo Arenas, Ariel Dorfman, and Tomás Eloy Martínez,
the literature of exile has been the product of cultural elites, whose
education and societal privileges in the homeland resulted in their
texts standing as representatives of Spanish-language purity (casticismo), canonical European referents, and, at times, as in the case
of the Porfirio Díaz regime in exile, a disdain for the working class
and the racial inferiors (economic refugees) of their homeland now
sharing their exile. It was often these elites who provided cultural
products, such as popular theater, newspapers, and even books, who
often promoted to the working classes—las clases populares, in their
words—the idea of a national culture in exile alongside their propaganda against the regimes in power in the homeland.
6. From the 1800s to the present, native Hispanic texts have been written predominantly in Spanish; however, there have always been
works written in English—today more than ever, of course.5 Since
the late nineteenth century, native Hispanic texts have been synthesizing Latino and Anglo-American culture, creating a hybridism in
language and outlook on life, relating both to mainstream American
culture and the entire world of Hispanic letters and culture beyond
the borders of the United States (Leal 1993). The most obvious
manifestation of this is the bilingual poetry and song emerging in the
late nineteenth century (Leal 1993, 92) but reaching its apogee in the
poetic and theatrical works of such contemporary writers as Alurista,
Tato Laviera, Carlos Morton, Gustavo Pérez Firmat, Luis Valdez, and
Evangelina Vigil; one of the few fiction projects to experiment with
this code-switching and heteroglossia is Rolando Hinojosa’s Klail City
Death Trip Series (Sánchez 1985). Some scholars have considered this
phenomenon particularly characteristic of “border literature”; in any
case, this synthesis has led to a new aesthetic in which a bilingualbicultural reader is implicit and the definition of literature has been
altered. In some writers’ texts, as in the poetry of Alurista, the experimentation results in a text that is fully intelligible only to a reader who
can understand the metalanguage created out of the artistic interface
of two languages, as in Alurista’s Spik in glyph? Along with the synthesis and hybridism come new cultural spaces or homelands, such as
the mythic Aztlán of Chicano literature, or the Loisaida of Nuyorican
literature (see Zapf, in this collection), or even the mythologizing of
Miami in Cuban American literature, as in Iván Acosta’s El super. An
important transitional work is the creation of this type of mythic
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homeland in Guillermo Cotto-Thorner’s Trópico en Manhattan,
which posits the “tropicalization” of El Barrio, a place where Puerto
Ricans can maintain their culture and flourish as exemplified by his
iconic metaphor of a flower growing out of the cracks in the cement.
The “tropics of Manhattan” trope becomes fully realized, however, in
the poems of such Nuyoricans as Víctor Hernández Cruz and Tato
Laviera, especially in Hernández Cruz’s book Tropicalization and in
Laviera’s birth-of-the Nuyorican poem, “Doña Cisa y Su Anafre” in
his La Carreta Made a U-Turn.
Immigrant texts envision an enclave or a “colonia” as a temporary home, where their culture can flourish until return to the true
homeland is possible. Even while the beginning of cultural synthesis
and hybridism is evident in these texts, as for example in the English
loan words and neologisms used, they offer themselves as pure and
exempt from bastardization or degradation of what is to them the
culture the immigrants brought with them and must preserve—even
while the culture in the homeland is evolving and perhaps incorporating Anglo-American or metropolitan ways of its own. In the ideology of El México de afuera, there is nothing lower than anyone who
denies his culture of origin or forgets his native tongue (el renegado).
These colonias, often the original ports of entry to the United States,
are known in the English-speaking world and to many of the residents themselves as Spanish Harlem, Little Havana, Little San Juan,
and Little Mexico; they are the spaces that later native literature will
mythologize as Aztlán and Loisaida, for instance.
There is no question of cultural mixing and hybridity in exile
literature; the texts represent the best of language and learning that
privilege, education, and high culture can offer. Some of the best
examples are the poems in El laúd del desterrado. In many of them,
as in much of the exile texts created to the present, the homeland is
envisioned as a Zion longed for by the poet in Babylonian captivity, with the Metropolis configured as Babel. From the frigid shores
of New York and the cement landscape of the Metropolis, Cuba
and Puerto Rico are often configured as Paradise Lost. As political change in the homeland becomes more and more a lost cause,
the plaintiff literature of exile exhibits a grand disillusionment and
lost hope, the narrators thus forced to wander, rootless, in solitude
through foreign lands and cultures. The greatest poet of this wanderlust and desperation was, perhaps, José María Heredia.
7. From the corridos forward to contemporary texts, culture conflict
becomes a central motif and organizing force in Mexican American/
Chicano literature, as described in Américo Paredes’ scholarly studies
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39
(Paredes 1995) and illustrated in his literary works, such as George
Washington Gómez. Cuban American and Puerto Rican texts, such
as Gustavo Pérez Firmat’s Life on the Hyphen: The Cuban American
Way and Juan Flores’ Divided Borders: Essays on Puerto Rican Identity,
attempt to resolve this conflict by celebrating the new hybridism; but
in the end, according to Pérez Firmat, the loss of Latino culture will
ensue, for he sees only his generation of Cuban Americans as able
to balance the two cultures in opposition and conflict. However, the
first phase of contemporary Chicano literature promoted a cultural
nationalism and a separation from oppressive and corrupt AngloAmerican culture; today’s Mexican American literature, as much of
Nuyorican and Cuban American literature, embraces the hybridism,
synchronicity, and synthesis.
Culture conflict was/is integral to immigrant literature’s binary
structure and opposition of the homeland’s culture to that of the
United States. It is highly nationalistic, although the nation is imagined more through nostalgia and illusion than through a realistic
assessment of the difficult life left behind and of the negative aspects
of the national culture. One of the few immigrant texts to follow a
protagonist back to the homeland and to elaborate on his rejection of
what it has become is Teodoro Torres’s La patria perdida; unable to fit
in, he returns from Mexico to Missouri farm country and attempts to
establish his own Utopian version of the México de afuera.
Exile literature is often part of a nation-building project, despite
its location outside of the geographic patria. It can be very militant,
supporting revolution, coups, and invasions. The first Hispanic
exiled texts, in fact, provided a liberal ideology for the wars of
independence from Spain, as well as for the rise of democracy in la
Madre Patria. To date, exilic texts support their imagined nation in
opposition to the one currently institutionalized in the homeland.
8. Both positive and negative hybrid characters exist in U.S. Latino
literature. There are hybrid characters who proudly reap the benefits of bilingual-bicultural life, such as Tato Laviera’s Tito Madera
Smith, raised in the barrio by a Puerto Rican mother and a southern black father. Hinojosa, too, has created in Becky Escobar, in
Los amigos de Becky, rather than a type, an individual who is a
strong, capable navigator of both Anglo and Mexican cultures; her
mixed Anglo-Mexican parents make her a full and equal match of
Hinojosa’s bilingual-bicultural alter egos, Rafa and Jehú. The two
most important character types to represent hybridism in native literature are the pachuco, uncomfortable in Mexican as well as American
culture, and the vendido, or sell-out, who trades his Mexican ethnic
NICOLÁS KANELLOS
and cultural allegiance for personal gain in the system of racial and
economic oppression. It was Luis Valdez who produced the most
enduring representations of these types in Los Vendidos and in Zoot
Suit, but the types are ubiquitous in Chicano drama and narrative—
ironically Hinojosa has given us an excellent rendition of the vendido in Becky Escobar’s husband, Ira, in Mi querido Rafa.
Ultimately, the vendido is the native version of the negative
immigrant stereotypes of earlier generations, such as the agringado,
the pelona (flapper), and the renegade in the crónicas and the novels
of immigration—not to be confused with the pocho, who was never
considered a Mexican to begin with. Another frequent stereotype in
immigrant literature, like the others born in oral lore, is the verde,
or greenhorn, who misinterprets American language and culture
and becomes the subject of extreme exploitation. The literature of
exile, however, does not embrace culture change and hybridism.
Thus, instead of characters that represent these social evolutions, it
has historically produced both epic heroes and tragic heroes, as in
Francisco Sellén’s play Hatuey, as well as blood-thirsty dictators, as
in Gustavo Solano’s play Sangre, based on Guatemalan strong man
Manuel Estrada Cabrera.
9. As a literature struggling for recognition and respect of its place
in American society and culture, native literature develops themes
around such issues as the identity crisis, bilingualism and biculturalism, race-class-gender discrimination, and the importance of
community. These issues have been central to such foundational
works of contemporary U.S. Latino literature as Iván Acosta’s El
Super, Rudolfo Anaya’s Bless Me, Ultima, Nicholasa Mohr’s Nilda,
Tomás Rivera’s “… y no se lo tragó la tierra,” Piri Thomas’s Down
These Mean Streets, and even such religious conversion narratives as
Nicky Cruz’s Run, Baby, Run. In the second and third waves of contemporary U.S. Latino literature, published by mainstream presses,
these issues remain strong, as in Alicia Gaspar de Alba’s Sor Juana’s
Second Dream and Desert Blood, Julia Alvarez’s How the García Girls
Lost Their Accent, Sandra Cisneros’s Caramelo, Junot Díaz’s The Brief
Wonderous Life of Oscar Wao, Cristina García’s Dreaming in Cuban,
and Virgil Suárez’s Going Under, among many others. The latter
waves have coincided with the increased number of Latinos writing
in English and graduating from university creative writing programs
and, thus, fully versed on the American literary canon and decidedly
engaged in broadening it.
From the early twentieth century on, immigrant literature has
remained focused on writing the nation through rejecting the
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41
Metropolis as the vortex of values antithetical to the culture of the
homeland: materialism versus idealism and spirituality, individualism versus family and community, labor exploitation and discrimination versus equal opportunity and egalitarianism, liberalism that
verges on libertinism6 versus traditional gender roles, etc. This binary
opposition remains strong from the first novel of immigration, Alirio
Díaz Guerra’s Lucas Guevara, to the current installments, such as
Roberto Quesada’s The Big Banana and Nunca entres por Miami.
Despite the persistence of this binary, there is a growing immigration
literature that is not positing a return to the homeland, as in Eduardo
González Viaña’s El corrido de Dante.
Exile literature today remains as committed to political causes as
when José Alvarez de Toledo, Félix Megía, and Félix Varela attacked
the French intervention in Spain and the Spanish monarchy and
cultivated the Spanish Black Legend in support of their wars of
independence in the first decades of the nineteenth century. Today,
despite the restoration of democratic rule in Argentina, for example,
a writer like Tomás Eloy Martínez, who has found a home in the
American academy, continues to elaborate his attack on Argentine
authoritarianism in Santa Evita, The Lives of the General, and The
Tango Singer. And the Mariel generation of exile writers, as represented by Reinaldo Arenas and others, continues to attack Castro
and Cuban communism.
10. While autobiography and memoir writing began among Latinos
in the mid-nineteenth century, among such writers as Juan
Nepumoceno Seguín, documenting their disillusion with the newly
installed Anglo-American legal and governmental system in Texas
and the Southwest, these genres became more popular as American
Protestant influence increased and a number of converts documented, faithful to American canonical patterns, how they reformed
their ways and accepted Christ. Of a number of these conversion
narratives, the one that was most influential went through multiple
printings from the time of its first publication in 1898 to 1968, its
last edition: José Policarpo Rodríguez’s “The Old Guide,” Surveyor,
Scout, Hunter, Indian Fighter, Ranchman, Preacher: His Life in His
Own Words. Although this genre has remained strong among U.S.
Latinos, actually producing in contemporary times the all-time
best-seller in Latino literature, Nicky Cruz’s Run, Baby, Run, some
of the most recognized Latino novels have followed the patterns
of American ethnic autobiography, especially as practiced by the
children of Irish, Italian, Polish, and Jewish immigrants in the
early twentieth century. Some of the most prominent works in
NICOLÁS KANELLOS
contemporary U.S. Latino literature have been considered bildungsroman and künstlerroman, with their protagonists struggling as
Latinos to come of age in American society, such as Rodolfo Anaya’s
Bless Me, Ultima, Sandra Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street,
Nicholasa Mohr’s Nilda, Piri Thomas’ Down These Mean Streets,
José Antonio Villarreal’s Pocho, and a legion of works of first-time
U.S. Latino novelists issuing from mainstream, commercial presses
since some of these foundational works were published. This type
of writing, which usually reinforces the canons of American literature, seems to announce the presence and Americanization of
the particular ethnic at a specific time in history, petitioning for
admission to the American imaginary by adopting the national
values of individualism and persistence in the face of discrimination and by chucking out the old-country language and values that
hinder assimilation into American society, as in Richard Rodríguez’s
Hunger of Memory.
Many immigration narratives gloss on the Hispanic novel par
excellence, Don Quixote, as their protagonists pursue the illusion
of fortune and/or fame in the United States. Closely linked to the
broad pattern canonized by Cervantes is the picaresque novel as an
influence on immigration novels. As you would have it and despite
its emerging from popular anecdote and lived experience, Daniel
Venegas’s Las aventuras de Don Chipote, o cuando los pericos mamen
glosses on these two sources. It can be argued that the novel of
immigration in its examination of the life and culture of the United
States, like the Quixote and many picaresque novels, is a novel of
the road in which the characters suffer physical and emotional pain,
exploitation, and discrimination during their journey, thus demythologizing the United States as the land of equality and opportunity. Such has been the case from Conrado Espinosa’s El sol de
Tejas to Mario Bencastro’s Odisea del Norte and Eduardo González
Viaña’s El corrido de Dante. Unlike the contemporary novel of native
Hispanics, which explores the psychological conflicts and evolution of the protagonist as an individual, the novel of immigration
remains more focused on the protagonist as a representative of his
people in a plot that is often epic in scope.
The greatest flowering of exile narrative has been in the novels
of the Mexican Revolution that were published in the United States
from 1915, the date that Mariano Azuela’s Los de abajo was issued
in El Paso, to 1935, when Alberto Rembao’s Lupita: A Story of the
Revolution in Mexico adapted the genre in English to promote his
religious ideology. From 1910 to the mid-1930s, Mexican political
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43
discourse accounted for much periodical and literary publishing in
the Southwest. In the East, nonfiction prose, fiction narrative, and
poetry from the 1930s to the post–World War II period often supported the Republican cause in Spain, as in the works of Prudencio
de Pereda. And, of course, because we are still very close to the
historical realities of contemporary Central America, Cuba, Chile,
and Argentina, we are very familiar with the impact of politics on
the literature being produced by the political refugees from those
countries. Nevertheless, at this juncture in time, no genre has been
more foundational to the national literature of a homeland and to
the development of Latino literature in the United States than the
long-lived novel of the Mexican Revolution.
***
The preceding has been an illustration of the general schema of Latino literature in the United States. It is not meant to bind or limit interpretation
of the various texts and their authors, but to serve as a general guideline to
understanding the relationship of native, immigrant, and exile texts to each
other, as well as to problematize the relationship of these texts and authors
to their homelands and, indeed, to the whole Hispanic world. In essence, we
have sought to illustrate that U.S. Latino literature has been from its origins
in the early nineteenth century, and still is today, a transnational phenomenon, one that crosses borders physically and/or symbolically, constructs
more than one national identity at a time, or deconstructs and rejects them
all, always gazing either at the land it left behind or at the land of reception
and reinvention. And even when reinventing itself in English along the lines
of the American canon, it nevertheless continues to maintain a gaze on “our
house in the last world,” as Oscar Hijuelos phrased it in the title to his first
novel. For natives, the “last world” is the general Hispanic background in
Spain and this hemisphere and the history on land that became part of the
United States. But the economic and political refugees, on the other hand,
continue to erase the borders separating them politically and geographically from very specific residences prior to their American sojourn.
Notes
1. The Recovery Project was founded in 1990 by scholars who recognized that a vast
corpus of writing by U.S. Hispanics prior to 1960 remained virtually unknown and
scattered across the United States and various “homelands.” Funded in the main by
American foundations, the Project researches and preserves through microfilming
the written culture of Latinos; makes it accessible through publications and
online delivery; furthers its study through grants to researchers, conferences,
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
NICOLÁS KANELLOS
and curriculum projects; and seeks to integrate it into all levels of education and
popular culture. Centered at the University of Houston, its advisory board is made
up of scholars, librarians, and archivists from across the United States, Mexico,
the Caribbean, and Spain. For further information consult www.artepublicopress.
com.
While printing technology was not new to Spanish America, access to a free
press, in fact, drew intellectuals and revolutionists to Philadelphia, Boston, and
New York from 1800s to the 1830s to write their respective nations and smuggle
the resultant books back into Spanish America. See Kanellos 2005.
For nation-building efforts of Cubans in the United States during the nineteenth century, see Poyo 1989 and Lazo 2005.
As Bruce-Novoa has stated, “And when exiles cannot return, they dedicate
themselves to justifying their existence in a dual manner: they manipulate the
image and significance of their resistance outside their country by discrediting
what the homeland has become; and two, they set about proving that they are
the authentic bearers of the true tradition of the homeland and even of the ideals of the attempted revolution. . . . Eventually this exercise in self-justification
leads to the claim that the homeland has actually moved with the exiles, that
they have managed to bring it with them in some reduced form, and that if
the opportunity should arise, they can take it back to replant it in the original
garden of Eden. This explains how the Lozano group dared called themselves
‘El México de Afuera’” (Bruce-Novoa 1989, 153).
While many scholars believe that the great majority of U.S. Latinos write in
English, they have not conducted the research that would conclude this. It
is rather their observation of what is produced by publishers, not writers,
that leads them to think this, without reflecting on such market conditions
as reviewing media, language preference of librarians and bookstore owners/
managers, promotion, and distribution systems, etc. A round number for
texts submitted to Arte Público Press in Spanish today would be 40 percent.
Nevertheless, in the relative absence of reviewing and distribution systems for
Spanish-language books today, Arte Público is forced to publish the majority of
its adult literature in English.
Alirio Díaz Guerra fully elaborates this theme, culminating with his characterization of the Statue of Liberty as the “Statue of Libertinism” (Estatua del
Libertinaje) in the very first novel of immigration, Lucas Guevara (1914).
References
44
Baeza Ventura, Gabriela. 2005. La imagen de la mujer en la crónica del “México de
Fuera.” Juárez, Mexico: Universidad Autónoma de Ciudad Juárez.
Basch, Linda, Nina Glick Schiller, and Cristina Szanton Blanc. 1993. Nations
Unbound: Transnational Projects, Postcolonial Predicaments, and Deterritorialized
Nation-States. New York: Routledge.
Bruce-Novoa, Juan. 1989. La Prensa and the Chicano Community. The Américas
Review 17.3–4: 150–156.
45
Gray, Paul Bryan. 2006–2007. Francisco Ramírez. A Short Biography. California
History 84.2: 20–39.
Kanellos, Nicolás. 2006–2007. El Clamor Público: Resisting the American Empire.
California History 84.2: 10–18, 69–70.
Kanellos, Nicolás. 2005. Hispanic Intellectuals Publishing in the NineteenthCentury United States: From Political Tracts in Support of Independence to
Commercial Publishing Ventures. Hispania 88.4: 687–692.
Lazo, Rodrigo. 2005. Writing to Cuba: Filibustering and Cuban Exiles in the United
States. Raleigh-Durham: University of North Carolina Press.
Leal, Luis. 1992. Adolfo Carrillo. In Dictionary of Literary Biography 122: 53–55.
Leal, Luis. 1993. Truth Telling Tongues: Early Chicano Poetry. In Recovering the U.S.
Hispanic Literary Heritage, ed. Ramón Gutiérrez and Genaro Padilla, 91-105.
Houston: Arte Público Press.
Mirandé, Alfredo. 1987. Gringo Justice. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame
Press.
Ong, Walter J. 1982. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. London:
Methuen.
Paredes, Américo. 1995. Folklore and Culture on the Texas-Mexican Border. Austin:
University of Texas Press.
Poyo, Gerald E. 1989. With All, and for the Good of All: The Emergence of Popular
Nationalism in the Cuban Communities of the United States, 1848–1898. RaleighDurham: Duke University Press.
Sánchez, Rosaura. 1985. From Heterogeneity to Contradiction: Hinojosa’s Novel.
In The Rolando Hinojosa Reader: Essays Historical and Critical, 76–100.
Houston: Arte Público Press.
Para Español Oprima El
Número Dos: Transnational
Translation and U.S. Latino/a
Literature
Marta E. Sánchez
I
n “Beyond Discipline? Globalization and the Future of English,” an
essay about the changing status of literary studies in English, Paul Jay
refers to a relatively recent explosion of literature in English produced in
the English-speaking postcolonial world. This literature, he says, has been
coming into Britain and the United States from India, the Middle East,
Canada, Africa, the South Pacific (Australia), the Philippines, and Guam,
and it is reshaping and reorganizing the disciplines of British and U.S. literatures. No longer, he argues, are these disciplines limited only to cultural
products produced inside the national borders of their respective countries, presumably united by common themes, values, a national language,
and literature. British and U.S. literatures are also projecting expressive
material from outside their national borders that is transforming them
into open-ended cultural systems in a transnational market economy. Jay’s
point is that British and U.S. literary studies in the modern era of globalization are “becoming defined less by nation than by language” (2001, 33).
I want to take advantage of Jay’s observation concerning the ascendancy
of language in a global world to offer some ideas on the Spanish language,
acts of translation, and U.S. Latina and Latino writing.
Jay’s claim about the new importance of language, over the political
entity “nation” as a unit of analysis, highlights a move in literary studies in English away from more confining organizational terms, such as
3
MARTA E. SÁNCHEZ
the “nation-state” and “national languages and literatures,” and toward
a wider context suggested by the adjectives “continental,” “hemispheric,”
and “global.”1 To say, for example, “Literatures in English” or “Literatures
in French” is to emphasize broad elements of language, linguistic bonds,
and literature as a continuum, regardless of national origin or cultural or
ethnic heritage. It is different than saying “British literature” or “American
(U.S.) literature,” headings that favor political borders and territorial maps
of modern nation-states.
English and American (U.S.) literary studies are not the only disciplines wrestling to enlarge their analytical domain. This reorganization
also applies, especially in the twenty-first century, to literary studies in
French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, and German, and it includes the less
usual suspects of Chinese, Hindi, Japanese, and Korean, for that matter
(“Papers” 2002). New communication technologies, the constant and
multidirectional movement of millions of people across national borders,
and the economic, familiar, and linguistic ties that migrants maintain
with their home countries are making it necessary for us to refocus the
direction of our scholarship in economics, law, the social sciences, arts,
and humanities. I want to focus on an explosive growth of translations
into Spanish of U.S. Latino/a literature written in English and published,
generally speaking, in the United States. On the surface, this kind of
translation seems to quarrel with the sovereign borders of the nation. It
goes against the national equation of one nation one language, and it also
promotes Spanish outside and inside the nation-state, because U.S. presses
apparently are widening and deepening the development of publication
and translation in Spanish. This involvement of U.S. presses in the translation of U.S. literature from English to Spanish for consumption in the
United States is, as far as I know, unprecedented.
The translation supported by major U.S. presses involves standard
English to standard Spanish. At times, translators use Spanglish (el espanglés,
el inglañol) in the translation of smaller linguistic units, such as dialogue or specific words: welfear/“welfare,” bloque/“block,” dáim/“dime”
(Santiago Cuando 1994, 254, 271, 275).2 Spanglish is the creative linguistic and syntactic amalgam of Spanish and English, whose evolution and
meaning is explained and performed by Ilan Stavans in Spanglish (2003,
1–54). Stavans describes el espanglés as “verbal promiscuity,” a linguistic
form “that refuses to accept anything as foreign” (9, 15). To my knowledge,
no major work of world literature has been translated into Spanglish,
except the small segment Stavans himself daringly decided to adapt into a
Spanglish mode of communication.3 He translates into Spanglish the first
chapter of el tesoro de la lengua castellana (the treasure of the Castillian
language), Don Quixote de la Mancha, to the chagrin of Spanish-language
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purists (Stavans 2003, 251–258). None of the Latino/a books that I allude
to in these pages has been translated, in their entirety or in part, into
Spanglish. Not yet.
Two major U.S. publishing houses in the vanguard of this translation
machine and with stated commitments to its growth and sustainability are
Vintage Español and Rayo; the first is an imprint of Random House, the
second of Harper Collins. These are multinational publishing houses with
a major presence in the First World. They commission a good share of the
translations from English to Spanish of Latino/Latina creative writings
and then sell them in domestic and international markets.4 This turn in
translation, a trans-national turn,5 of U.S. Latino texts begins in the early
1990s, and it is a result, in part, of the publishing houses’ perception that
these books, once translated into Spanish, will be of interest to the increasing numbers of Spanish-speaking readers in the United States and also in
the international market. Karin N. Kiser, an internationally recognized
expert on the Spanish book industry in the United States, reports that in
2000 the Spanish book market was estimated at $368 million and that the
New York Times had estimated the annual buying power of Hispanics to
surpass $440 billion this same year (2000, 47). Carmen Ospina, writing
for Críticas, the English-speaker’s guide to Spanish-language titles, estimated in 2006 that the purchasing power of Hispanic consumers in the
United States had surged to a 700 billion-dollar market (3). This steadily
upward-moving market has created a need, or desire, in the U.S. publishing industry to reach and attract the Spanish-reading segment of the larger
U.S. Latino/a market audience. The term “Hispanics” seems to be the
preferred label in the governmental and marketing sources I cite for this
essay, but I prefer the label “Latinos/as” to designate the Spanish-language
origin population in the United States. Rosaura Sánchez and Beatrice Pita
refer to a Latino/a population as “a nexus of diverse groups that differ
at the level of national origin, race, residential status, class, gender, and
political views” (2006, 25). They also include ethnicity, sexual orientation,
and forms of labor (28). In a list of differentiating factors, I would stress
“Spanish-language competence.”
The unit guiding this market outreach is language. If the unit were the
territorial boundaries of “nationness,” or the commonly assumed oneto-one correspondence between one language and a national literature
written in that language, translation would not be necessary, but the publishing enterprise of converting Latino/a literature into Spanish depends
heavily upon translation and translators. The organizing unit is not juridical citizenship or residency: what matters is not whether consumers with
purchasing power in this market are citizens, legal residents, or undocumented migrants but whether they are Spanish-reading (Ospina 2006, 3).
TRANSNATIONAL TRANSLATION AND U.S. LATINO/A LITERATURE
MARTA E. SÁNCHEZ
What seems to be happening is that the perceived and actual buying
power of a Spanish-language reading public in the United States, rather
than citizenship and legal status, is determining the influence of the
Spanish language in the United States and the publication and distribution of books in Spanish in a transnational global market. Spanish has no
institutional and political social standing as a second national language in
the United States, there is no “army” to sustain and legitimate it, but it does
have an important demographic and economic presence and force behind
it (Villa 2000, 143). After all, it is the language that we hear again and again
when we dial a business, a governmental agency, or practically any institution, public or private: Para español oprima el número dos.
What does this phenomenon say about, and do to, the idea of “America,”
“American,” and “Americanness”? Does the act of translating English texts
into Spanish encourage a critical reimagining of the common and reductive mistranslation of the American hemisphere into the United States? Or,
does it reinforce this mistranslation? How do the various presses position
these books, and what do their marketing strategies tell us about how
they perceive the needs of the Spanish-language audience? How well do
they know this audience that is both in the United States and elsewhere
in the Spanish-language world? Before I turn to describing in more detail
this translational phenomenon, let me say a few words about the Spanish
language today.
Like English, the Spanish language is part of, and participates in, a
complex system of transnational cultural exchange. The Spanish original
of Laura Esquivel’s Como agua para chocolate, for example, was published
by Doubleday in 1993 and the translation by Anchor in 1994. By 1994 it
had sold over 70,000 in hardback and 63,000 in paperback in the United
States (Bearden 1994, 40). Partnerships are formed between U.S. and
Spanish publishers, such as Vintage Español and the Barcelona-based publisher Planeta, or Rayo and Planeta (Bardales 2006, 5); Grupo Santillana,
a prominent Spanish publishing conglomerate, set up various imprints,
such as Alfaguara and Punto de Lectura, in the United States. This is
another indication that Spanish at least might have outgrown the conventional categories of “nation” and “national culture” and is complicating
our notion of geopolitical borders.
We know that Hindi and Chinese are the most spoken languages in
the world. In third place is English, but as Mary Louise Pratt reminds us,
English holds its ranking not as a native language but as a second language
or lingua franca (2002, 1287 n1). In other words, English is a “foreign,”
a learned language, not a native tongue, to the majority of people in the
world. After English, Spanish is the most spoken language by native speakers. The United States, notably, is the fifth largest Spanish-speaking nation.
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51
Within ten years, it will have surpassed Spain, Colombia, and Argentina in
number of Spanish speakers. Only Mexico will have more Spanish speakers than the United States (Kiser 1999, 35).
Spanish (one of the LOTE [Languages Other Than English]) occupies
a different place in the history and historical memory of the United States
than the other European and Asian languages (the LOTS [Languages
Other Than Spanish]) that make up a U.S. multilingual heritage. My intent
is not to single out Spanish as some kind of exceptional language, deserving special status—all languages merit attention and cultivation. Rather,
my intent is to recognize the role Spanish has played and is playing in the
history and social reality of the United States. The United States, now more
than ever, is part of the Spanish-speaking Américas.
Excepting the Amerindian languages—Navajo, Lakota, Kumeyaay,
Cree—which deserve protection against extinction, Spanish is the language with the longest, most sustained presence and largest population of
speakers in U.S. territory. Proposing the term “modern languages” instead,
Mary Louise Pratt has urged the expunging of “the term foreign to refer
to languages other than English. Nothing is more repugnant to someone
working in Spanish in this country than to hear it referred to as a ‘foreign’
language. Its history here, after all, predates English” (Pratt 1995, 64).6
Spanish speakers arrived on these shores more than a century before the
Mayflower in 1620, when Juan Ponce de León landed in 1513 and called
the land Florida. Addressing the issue of “foreign” languages in a transnational world and within the corporate university, Walter Mignolo asserts
that after five centuries Spanish has become “not only a foreign language
but also a minority national language in the United States” (Mignolo 2000,
1239). Adding his voice more recently to a discussion about the prevailing
and erroneous perception of Spanish as a “foreign” language, in spite of
the Spanish boom in language departments and the substantial rise in the
U.S. Spanish-speaking and Latino/a- (or Hispanic-) identified population,
is Carlos Alonso. Like Mignolo, Alonso captures the paradoxical status of
Spanish in the title of his essay “Spanish: The Foreign National Language.”
After noting the expected but no less “stunning announcement” in 2003
by the Bureau of the Census that “Hispanics had overtaken blacks as the
largest racial-ethnic minority in the United States” (Alonso 2006, 16) and
suggesting that scholars working in and on Spanish “undertake an institutional rethinking and reshaping of the place occupied by Spanish language and culture in the United States academic world,” he boldly argues
that “Spanish is . . . no longer a foreign language in the United States”; it
is rather, he says, a language possessing the status of a second national
language: “the evidence of it is everywhere. The omnipresent bilingual
English-Spanish signs, the ubiquitous automated telephone option ‘Para
MARTA E. SÁNCHEZ
español, oprima el número dos,’ the direct mailings written in Spanish,
the targeted telephone solicitations in that language, the wide availability
of dubbed versions of films, the snippets of conversations in Spanish that
we hear with increasing frequency from couples or groups passing by on
the street, and so on” (Alonso 2006, 17).7 Need he say more?
Spanish extends beyond the U.S.-Mexican borderlands, where, one might
argue, its speakers have been crossing national borders since the artificial line
of demarcation was imposed in 1848 as a result of the Treaty of Guadalupe
Hidalgo; it extends beyond the northeastern United States, where Puerto
Ricans have been crossing “el charco” (the puddle, used ironically by Puerto
Ricans to name the Atlantic Ocean) since U.S. citizenship was imposed on
them by fiat in 1917. The number of Spanish speakers from Mexico and
Southern, Central, and Caribbean Américas has grown in Iowa, Minnesota,
and Illinois, and Spanish speakers are migrating into areas where previously
there were no, or very small, Spanish-speaking populations: Georgia, North
Carolina, Missouri, Utah, and Oregon, for example. The Latino population
in New Orleans, legal and illegal, has tripled in the aftermath of Hurricane
Katrina (Lehr 2007). This type of migration shows the “foreign” (or global)
impacts on the “non-foreign” (or the local) and vice versa: global and
local are mutually implicating. Leaving aside the contentious debate about
English-Only, the movement, political stand, and practice, Spanish is on the
threshold: a “no-longer” and a “not-yet” that is no longer a foreign language
but not yet a recognized second national language in the United States.
As the world becomes more transnational, the ability to read and speak
different languages and the art of translation become more necessary and
important.8 But just as the homegrown movement of multiculturalism of
the 1980s paid little attention to multilingualism, so too, transnationalism fails to bring with it a national awareness or support for linguistic
diversity (Shell and Sollors 2000, 2–4).9 In the context of globalization, we
hear “transnational,” “transethnic,” “multiethnic,” “multinational,” “multicultural,” but seldom “translingual,” “multilingual,” or “interlingual.” It
is ironic: interest in the “other” implied by both multiculturalism and
transnationalism, albeit in different ways and for different reasons, fails to
promote interest and support for the study of languages, either at levels of
social practice or in scholarship, spoken by those “others.”
My concern here is a body of literature by Spanish-speaking heritage
groups who reside in the United States and write in the national language
but whose creative writings began to appear in the 1990s in Spanish
translation. In 2000 the Census Bureau announced the figure of 35.3 million for the Latino population (U.S. Bureau of the Census 2001), but the
trans-national phenomenon of these translations began before this fact
became known. In 2003, the U.S. Census Bureau reported that over half
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53
of the estimated 15 million Latina/o immigrants currently in the United
States entered the country after 1990 (Sánchez 2006, 39), the majority of
whom, understandably, would use Spanish as their first language in private
and public settings. The publication, translation, and distribution of books
in Spanish in the United States in historical time not only coincides with
the signing of NAFTA into international law in 1993, but also gels with
the data reported by the Census Bureau in 2000 and especially the data
about the new arrivals during the 1990s released in 2003.10 The increase
in Latino/a buying power and the idea of dominant Spanish-language
niche audiences would have encouraged presses to address these readers.
Hence, the timing of the initiation of translations into Spanish coincides
with the timing of NAFTA and the dramatic increase in Latina/o Spanishmonolingual immigrants, especially in the 1990s.
This increase in Spanish-language publishing also coincided with events
of different political impulses than the transnationalism of NAFTA and the
more recent Spanish-speaking arrivals. The translation phenomenon I am
addressing in these pages takes place at the juncture of ideologies that pull
in opposite directions. On the one hand, there is NAFTA—a transnational,
presumably open, trade agreement that relaxes barriers to the movement
of goods and investments among Canada, Mexico, and the United States.
One might have expected a free-trade market of economic goods to open
up markets for the freer trading of words—the circulation of languages
(and people), at least of Spanish and perhaps of some indigenous Mexican
languages, such as Zapotec and Mixtec. But such was not the case because
pushing against a free flow of peoples and their languages are Operation
Gatekeeper (1994) and Operation Hold-the-Line (1993): border-sealing
mechanisms aimed at tightening and upholding the boundaries of the border region. Complementing these last two operations is the highly limiting
and restrictive English-Only movement led by U.S. conservatives, ready to
defend the linguistic borders of “one nation, one national language.” The
ideological intersection of NAFTA with Operation Gatekeeper, Operation
Hold-the-Line, and English-Only language policies suggests that global
(NAFTA) and local (the geographical and linguistic operations) contracts
exist simultaneously. The transnational and the national are separate pulls
but nonetheless are joined.
I emphasize this opposing tension between the transnational and the
national by hyphenating “trans-national” in my title. The translation
of U.S. Latino/a literature by multinational publishing houses is transnational—it looks inward but also outward, and it highlights the relation
of the Spanish-speaking population residing in and entering the United
States to historical processes accentuated by globalization. It dramatizes
the tensions between the demand of the free market for the integration of
MARTA E. SÁNCHEZ
financial global markets (NAFTA, the European community, CAFTA), on
the one hand, and a nation’s political and nostalgic longing for a juridical
citizenship demanded by the nation-state, on the other hand (Operation
Gatekeeper etc. and English-Only).
What is peculiar about this translational phenomenon is not the publication of creative texts in Spanish in the United States. Spanish-language presses
began operating in Monterey, California, in 1834 (Meléndez 1997, 5), and
about 132 Spanish-language newspapers were published in the Southwest
between 1848 and 1900 (Savin 1996, 345–346). The newspaper El Clamor
Público of Los Angeles dates to 1855, La Prensa in San Antonio to 1913, and
La Opinión in Los Angeles to 1926 (Meléndez 1997, 5). Eusebio Chacón’s
novels El hijo de la tempestad and Tras la tormenta la calma were published
in Spanish in Santa Fe, New Mexico, in 1892. An El Paso newspaper, El Paso
del Norte, published Mariano Azuela’s classic novel Los de abajo in serial
format. The same newspaper published it as a book in 1916 (Parra 2005, 23,
144–145). Poetry written by Spanish-literate New Mexicans appeared in the
Spanish-language press between 1889 and 1950 (Arellano 1976).
Nor does the element of “newness” lie in the semantic and syntactic
transaction from English into Spanish—albeit important and common
enough in the world of translation. Four features characterize the novelty
of the translation enterprise: (1) who commissions the translations, (2)
their scale and intensity, (3) the source language of the texts being translated, and (4) their single-language presentation.
First, U.S. presses are commissioning translations of books already
written in what is thought to be the national language. Why are major
presses translating them if they are already in English, especially in light
of the notoriety of official English language initiatives in several states,
most notably California in 1998 and Arizona in 2004, seeking to eradicate
and, in some cases, criminalize all non-English languages—but mostly
Spanish—and to enthrone English as the “one,” “the only” language of
public space?11 This translation into Spanish is a significant modification of
the classic kind of translation we are accustomed to seeing presses initiate.
Usually, a book’s translation is commissioned by an outside publisher—a
publisher of a different national culture to which the source book belongs.
This publisher acquires the rights to the original and then arranges to
have the novel, or other kind of verbal object, translated into the target, or
national, language. Examples of classic translation into English are Gabriel
García-Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, 1970 (translator Gregory
Rabasa by Harper & Row; original title Cien años de soledad, 1967); Günter
Grass’s Tin Drum, 1961 (translator Ralph Manheim by Random House;
original title Die Blechtrommel, 1959); and Isabel Allende’s The House of
the Spirits, 1985 (translator Magda Gobin by Knopf; original title La casa
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55
de los espíritus, 1982). The kind of translation I am talking about might be
thought of as a reversal of the classic type of translation, because instead of
translating from a different modern language into the national language,
U.S. presses are commissioning translations from the de facto “official”
national language (English) into a relatively familiar language (Spanish).
Second, the volume and scale of English-to-Spanish translations by
major presses is significant. Among the titles published in translation in
the 1990s were Rudolfo Anaya’s Bless Me, Ultima (1992), Sandra Cisneros’
The House on Mango Street (1994), José Antonio Villarreal’s Pocho (1994),
Esmeralda Santiago’s When I Was Puerto Rican (1994) and Almost a
Woman (1999), Cristina García’s Dreaming in Cuban (1994), Ana Castillo’s
Mixquiahuala Letters (1994), Oscar Hijuelos’ Mambo Kings Play Songs of
Love (1996), Sandra Cisneros’ Woman Hollering Creek (1996), Junot Díaz’s
Drown (1997), Graciela Limón’s In Search of Bernabé (1997), Piri Thomas’
Down These Mean Streets (1998), and Julia Alvarez’s In the Time of the
Butterflies (1998). The Spanish translation of Alvarez’s How the García
Girls Lost Their Accents (1991), De cómo las muchachas García perdieron el
acento, was released by Vintage in October 2007.
This information tells us that market pressures are creating a demand
“here” and “out there” for, broadly speaking, material in Spanish, and, more
specifically, for these translations. Have Spanish-dominant and biliterate
U.S. Latinos just begun to read? Or, has a demand increased exponentially,
and the large presses now see financial reasons for entering into the market? Why the growth now? Are presses responding to a demand created by
the rise in enrollments in Spanish in postsecondary education?12 Welles
documents that almost 54 percent of all foreign-language enrollments in
2002 were in Spanish (2004, 12), and Furman notes a 10 percent increase
in Spanish enrollments by 2006 (2007, 2, 13). Are these enrollments in
Spanish significant enough in number to justify these translations?
Third, these texts are written by U.S. Spanish heritage speakers in the
language of the colonial country, but they are now being translated into the
language suppressed in the colonization. There is an interesting irony here.
Authors who write these books, one might argue, do not write in the home
language, that is, Spanish: the home language has been prohibited over time
by U.S. processes of linguistic assimilation. Rather, some of these writers—
Helena María Viramontes, Piri Thomas, Julia Alvarez, Cristina García, Junot
Díaz—have chosen to appropriate the English language and produce what
Frances Aparicio calls “sub-versive” narratives: they produce “undercover”
meanings to reveal their bilingual, bicultural sensibilities by encoding references, in English, to their lived realities in vernacular Spanish, showing us
just how interdependent and interactive, in partnership or in conflict, the
two languages and cultures are (Aparicio 1994). But since the 1990s, U.S.
MARTA E. SÁNCHEZ
presses are translating the products of this acculturated population into
the language “forgotten” in the colonial experience and are marketing them
in and outside the United States: to Latin and Central America, Spain, and
the Spanish-speaking Caribbean. They are, at least on the surface, taking
“familiar” domestic products and making them “strange” not only to international audiences but also to domestic readerships.
The fourth characteristic is the single-language nature of these translations. They are not, that is, published in bilingual format—the kind of
presentation Werner Sollors describes he wanted and obtained for the
Multilingual Anthology of American Literature and that the initial publishers he approached turned down for various reasons (Sollors 2002, 1292).13
The translations I am talking about are not facing-page bilingual editions:
non-English original on one side and English translation on the other
side. One of the few exceptions published since the 1990s in a bilingual
format is Tino Villanueva’s Escena de la película Gigante (2005), which is a
translation of the English original Scene from the Movie Giant, published
in 1993 by Curstone Press in Connecticut. In this case, the publisher of
the translation, Editorial Catriel, is not in the United States but in Madrid.
In this bilingual edition of poetry, Tino’s English originals appear on the
left-sided pages and Rafael Cabañas Alamán’s Spanish translations on the
right-sided pages. If the right side is dominant, then Spanish is privileged,
a perfectly understandable decision since the book is a translation.
A bilingual format in translation is important for several reasons. First,
it goes against the normativity of English or Spanish. It tells us that one
language is as necessary, as important, as the other. It alerts us to the fact
that cultural contact does not flow only one way, through a single medium.
Second, it speaks to the multilingualism of the United States, in this particular context English-Spanish. Third, it highlights the act of translation,
thereby going against the invisibility of the translator and, thereby, his/
her translation. Lawrence Venuti has argued convincingly that fluency and
transparency are the dominant objectives in an Anglo-American tradition
of translation and that these desired outcomes, unfortunately, make the art
of translation, and the translator, invisible. In other words, translation is
considered excellent when it sounds “original,” when, in contradiction to
its reason for being, it appears to have no relation to the real original text.
A bilingual format emphasizes this relationship. Last, it interrupts the U.S.
nationalist narrative of a one-language nation, of an English tradition starting with Jamestown and Plymouth, and of a self-evident truth that English
is or should be the only means of communication. Werner Sollors has
pointed out recently that the United States always has had, and still does, an
immense, though unrecognized, multilingual diversity. Its inhabitants have
not one but several linguistic mother countries (Shell and Sollors 2000, 8).
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57
Are these translations putting into question the normativity of English
as the dominant language or are they part of larger processes—the growth
in Spanish-language radio, television, the music industry; the growth of
Spanish-language speakers—that stimulate a backlash and invigorate a
nativist English-Only position? What may appear to be a process of denationalization through translation may really turn out to be more a process
of renationalization.
In conclusion I would like to return to my initial point: while language
might not be the sole factor to consider in forming new units of analysis
for literary studies and other disciplines, it is an important element to take
seriously—more seriously than we do now—as we rethink the way we teach
and study literatures, cultures, art, music, and the role translation plays in
a global society where transnational perspectives, transcultural mediation,
and translingual negotiation are iron necessities. Transnational audiences
are being created that are changing the meaning of “America(n)” and
showing that América is not just “over there”—beyond U.S. borders. The
United States is more and more becoming part of América aquí (America
is here), part of a hemispheric region that represents in its culture and
language, at least for me, not some kind of nostalgic romantic longing for
the past but a fact of historical and global development.
Notes
1. Wai-Chee Dimock extends the scale of analysis to the “planetary.”
2. No attribution to a translator appears on the dust jacket of Cuando era puertorriqueña / When I was Puerto Rican or in the publisher’s information, but
Santiago says in the introduction to the Spanish translation that she herself did
the translation (Cuando 1994, xvi–xvii).
3. I say “daringly” because Stavans, as he himself acknowledges, crossed una linea
peligrosa (a dangerous line) when he compiled a list of Spanglish terms, much
less take on the most sacred of sacred texts in Spanish civilization. He says:
“When news of my compilation of Spanglish terms spread throughout the
Hispanic world, the Academia Norteamericana de la Lengua, which remains
but a branch of its Madrid headquarters, issued an open letter—a fatwah, as
an interneta [Stavans’ spanglish term for “internet surfer”] described it once,
portraying me as ‘el Salman Rushdie de los latinos’—denouncing the effort as
an affront” (2003, 49). The phrase “el Salman Rushdie de los latinos” is from
an internet essay “Viva-Spanglish!” by Jonathon Keats (2004: 2).
4. Books written in Spanish are also published in Spanish by U.S. presses. For
example, the Colombian writer Laura Restrepo’s Dulce Companía (1995) and
La novia oscura (1999) originally published in Colombia by Editorial Norma
were republished in Spanish by Rayo in 2005 and 2002, respectively. Some
canonical Latin American writers—Gabriel García Márquez, Isabel Allende, and
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
MARTA E. SÁNCHEZ
Octavio Paz, to name only three—are also published in Spanish by U.S. presses.
In this paper I focus on U.S. Latino/a literature translated from English into
Spanish.
The hyphen in “trans-national” in my title stresses that the translation enterprise I speak about is not a matter of something that is totally unrelated to the
nation-state, but neither is it a matter of something purely national, or confined to geographical borders. The hyphen underscores a slippage, an ongoing
tension between global and local, transnational and national.
Pratt argues that the idea and use of “‘foreignness’ equally misapplies [in the
United States] to French, Cantonese, Italian, or Japanese—to say nothing of
Lakota, Navajo, or Cree. Following the tradition of the MLA, let us agree on
the term modern languages and put an end to another lexical legacy of the Cold
War.”
See also the other essays in the section “A Propos Spanish” in the ADFL Bulletin
of Alonso’s essay.
I do not want to imply that nations, or the idea of the “national,” do not exist
any more. We know that the idea of nation and “nationness” are alive and well
when it comes to the military and political industrial complexes. Issues of
immigration reform and English as the “official” language, the one and only
valid language for use in U.S. public spaces, are hotly debated in the media and
in everyday conversations.
Sollors calls language the blind spot of the modern multicultural age of the
1980s, when languages were not factored into the multicultural equation. In
other words, we do not recognize or promote the multitude of languages that
make up the United States.
The Census Bureau has projected that by 2020 the Hispanic population will
number 60 million, 18 percent of the total population, up from 6 percent in
1980 (U.S. Bureau of the Census 2008). As of July 2006, the Latino population
was estimated at 44.3 million, making it 15 percent of the total U.S. population
(U.S. Bureau of the Census 2007). See also Pew Hispanic Center, “Statistical
Portrait of Hispanics in the United States 2006,” Table 1–36.
I refer to California’s Proposition 227 and Arizona’s Proposition 203.
Less commonly taught languages such as Chinese and Arabic have had dramatic increases since 1968. See Welles (2004, 8).
Sollors explains how difficult it was to find a publisher willing to publish
The Multilingual Anthology of American Literature in a bilingual format, thus
respecting the value of the texts in their original language and emphasizing the
multilingual roots of U.S. literature. Among the several reasons he gives are
cost and readability.
58
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census.gov/population/www/socdemo/hispanic/hispanic.html.
Venuti, Lawrence. 1995. The Translator’s Invisibility. New York: Routledge.
———.1998. The Scandals of Translation. London: Routledge.
Villa, Daniel. 2000. Languages Have Armies, and Economies, Too: The Presence of
U.S. Spanish in the Spanish-Speaking World. Southwest Journal of Linguistics
19: 144–154.
Villanueva, Tino. 2005. Escena de la película. Edición Bilingüe. Trans. Rafael
Cabañas Alamán. Madrid: Catriel.
Welles, Elizabeth. 2004. Foreign Language Enrollments in United States Institutions
of Higher Education, Fall 2002. ADFL Bulletin 35.2–3: 7–26.
60
Transnational Migrations and
Political Mobilizations:
The Case of A Day
without a Mexican
María Herrera-Sobek
In order to make the invisible
visible you make it disappear.
(Sergio Arau and Yareli Arizmendi)
One morning California wakes up to find that one third of its population has disappeared. A thick fog surrounds the State and communication outside its boundaries is completely cut off. As the day goes by we
discover that the characteristic that links the 14 million disappeared is
their Hispanic background.
(A Day without a Mexican)
T
ransnational migrations from Mexico to the United States have significantly stimulated the creative imagination of Mexican and Chicano/a
artists and have led to a robust cultural production in films, musical compositions (corridos or ballads and canciones or songs), visual art, cartoons,
folk art, and literature (poetry, theater, novel, short story). In my book
Northward Bound: Mexican Immigration in Ballad and Song (1993), I identified more than 150 corridos and canciones whose subject matter deals with
transnational migrations. My book encompassed the period from 1850s to
the early 1990s. In the last decade of the twentieth century and now the
first decade of the twenty-first century, the cultural production focusing
4
62
MARÍA HERRERA-SOBEK
In Mexico alone, close to one hundred full-length “immigration movies” have been produced and distributed in the Americas. The films have
included works by many of Mexico’s most distinguished filmmakers such as
Miguel Contreras Torres, Alejandro Galindo, David Silva, Pedro Armendáriz,
Julio Alemán, Héctor Suárez, Ernesto Gómez Cruz, María Novaro, Patricia
Reyes Spíndola, Mario Almada, and Gonzalo Vega.
(Maciel and García-Acevedo 1998, 151)
With respect to Hollywood immigration-oriented film, Maciel and GarcíaAcevedo point out how this theme has been inscribed in Hollywood films
since 1912 with the silent film Her Last Resort. According to the two authors,
U.S. films tend to “follow basic discursive formula, a modified version of the
western in which the hero struggles valiantly against gangs involved in the
trafficking of undocumented workers, always defeating them at the end”
(Maciel and García-Acevedo 1998, 164). Furthermore, their message seems
to be unchanging, mainly pointing out “the importance of the control of
our southern border and the need to institutionalize a campaign against the
smuggling of undocumented workers to the United States” (164). Another
critique leveled by the two authors vis-à-vis Hollywood transnational
immigration films include their failure to provide rational solutions to the
issue of migratory movements and their poor quality, that is, most of these
films belong to the “B” category (low budget and secondary billing) (165).
It is specifically on the film A Day without a Mexican, which premiered
in 2004, that I want to focus my analysis. My study underscores how in the
twenty-first century transnational migratory movements to the United
States have taken a new tack consisting of open and massive political
mobilizations protesting inhumane treatment of migrants. These protest
movements also point out how the United States Congress and White
House have been unable to enact rational immigration laws that address
the transnational migratory movements of people. For the first time,
undocumented migrants have taken to the streets of American cities and
openly demonstrated and advocated for social justice and for an overhaul
of immigration policy. It is ironic that the North American Free Trade
Agreement (NAFTA), enacted by Congress in 1994, addresses the issue of
products crossing borders in an orderly manner, but U.S. lawmakers have
not been able to pass an immigration policy. Congress has been unable
to come to terms with the transnational movements of people crossing
on Mexican transnational movements has continued unabated. Films with
transnational migrant thematics have also been produced in large numbers.
In their essay “The Celluloid Immigrant: The Narrative Films of Mexican
Immigration,” David Maciel and María Rosa García-Acevedo state:
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national borders, and instead of rational legislation, what has been enacted
is a concrete wall running several miles along the U.S.-Mexican border.
Some of the above issues related to Mexican immigration are encapsulated in the film A Day without a Mexican and are dealt with in a satirical,
humorous, but pointed, manner.
The film, directed by Sergio Arau and co-written by Arau, Yareli Arizmendi,
and Sergio Guerrero, was released on May 14, 2004, and soon became a rallying cry around which protest movements coalesced and organized. This
work is often referred to as a “mockumentary” due to its combination of
satire, comedy, and documentary. Its central plot posits the following question: What would California, and by extension the United States, be like if all
Mexicans/Latinos (i.e., Mexicans, Mexican Americans, or Chicanos as well
as Latinos) suddenly disappeared? The answer, given the great number of
Mexicans/Latinos in California, is that without this ethnic population, who
make up the bulk of the workforce but who are very much maligned, the
Golden State would be an economic and social disaster. This then underscores the premise the film’s screenwriters seek to articulate: “[T]o make the
invisible visible by taking it away.” Temporality is of primary importance in
the film since the time frame (one day or twenty-four hours) and the issue of
Mexicans/Latinos living in the United States are elaborated upon in the story
line with respect to history. The film’s structure itself plays with temporality
since time is fragmented and with a multiplicity of rapid-fire scenes projected on the screen provides the viewer with a myriad of perspectives on the
sensitive issue of Mexicans/Latinos in the United States, both documented
and undocumented. In addition to temporality being of central importance,
the film uses flashbacks to travel back in time as historical and social issues
are elaborated upon and discussed.
The film’s closure is framed in a future-perfect idealized vision of
Mexicans and Latinos returning to California and with the hegemonic
population, Euro-Americans, exhibiting a new consciousness and displaying a new appreciation for the importance of this ethnic population living
in the state. Temporality is of significant importance since it is conceived
in a linear progression adhering to the Enlightenment’s concept of linking
the passage of time to progress. As the narrative evolves from point A in
time/space (the disappearance of Mexicans/Latinos) to point B in time/
space (their return), there is a change in the hegemonic society’s consciousness; that is, Euro-Americans finally realize the important role this
ethnic group plays in the social and economic fabric of the United States.
A Day without a Mexican also uses temporality as its structural axis
to inscribe and articulate the film’s progressive ideology. Time is the element through which Mexicans appear and disappear. The film’s narrative
is encapsulated in a twenty-four-hour time span; Mexicans disappear at
TRANSNATIONAL MIGRATIONS AND POLITICAL MOBILIZATIONS
six o’clock in the morning—the first Mexican to disappear is Roberto, a
musician and Ellen’s husband, although the local television news in Los
Angeles reports that by 6:00 a.m. there were 3,500 calls reporting workers missing. Ellen is one of the important protagonists/narrators in the
film’s narrative. She is the voice that begins the narrative by stating how
her husband, Roberto, was not by her side early in the morning when she
woke up. The film’s story line follows Ellen on and off from the time her
husband disappears to the following morning when her husband returns
after a twenty-four hour absence. The main protagonist is Lila Rodríguez,
a reporter for a Los Angeles television station, who has been assigned to
follow the story of the disappearance of Hispanics in the state. The twentyfour-hour time span is given by the morning light, the characters commenting how Mexicans/Latinos began disappearing, and different clues
given throughout the day both visually by the sun and then the coming
darkness, night activity, and then early morning activities when Mexicans/
Latinos return. One important motif appearing and reappearing throughout the film is a leaky faucet that is dripping water into a glass. As time
passes the glass begins to fill up. Early the next morning the Mexican or
Latino plumber appears to fix it. Interestingly enough, the water motif is
symbolically used to denote the new beginning of a different consciousness
in California. It precedes the reappearance of the Mexican/Latino population. Drops of water are dripped onto the various important characters
appearing in the film such as Ellen, Senator Steven Abercrombie, the elder
Mr. McClaire, and Aunt Gigi, among others. The water then symbolically
articulates a new beginning for California and its new appreciation for
transnational migratory movements. The water provides a cleansing effect
for the state; a cleansing of racism as well as benign neglect and indifference toward the Mexican/Latino population. Through this twenty-fourhour period, most of California’s white population is transformed from a
racially insensitive group to a more appreciative and loving group.
The film exhibits a combination of realist/formalist structures with a
dash of Latin American magic realism thrown in. Its plot is straightforward:
one day early in the morning, a pink fog descends on the state of California,
enclosing it on all four sides of the state’s boundary lines, and all Mexicans/
Latinos disappear. Communication with the rest of the United States and
the world is completely cut off. Where the Mexicans/Latinos go is not
known. Soon chaos permeates the lives of Anglo-Californians: politicians
disappear, the maids vanish, and white families are left helpless, unable to
fend for themselves. The car washes are left empty without the workers,
the agricultural fields are left to rot, and even the freeways are empty with
only a car or two shown in the freeway lanes. This of course produces joy
in some Angelinos as is evident in the blurb on the Internet advertising the
64
65
film: “Millions are gone, Less Traffic!” and is followed by the comments:
“Garbage accumulates on the city. There’s no health care, no teachers, no
fruits or vegetables, no cleaning, no comedians . . . and, thank god, no traffic!” (A Day without a Mexican). In the film itself some characters, such as
George McClaire, Mr. McClaire’s son, represents the redneck, racist sector
of Anglo-America; he is the spokesperson for an anti-immigration group.
He states at the beginning of the film while participating at a border vigilante demonstration: “We are Americans defending our land. White people
are disappearing and it’s our country. They are stealing our way of life.”
Equally racist is Senator Steven Abercrombie, of whom his aide states: “You
got elected senator hating Mexicans and now you are a governor loving
them” (A Day without a Mexican). Other evidence of Mexican/Latino haters includes a celebratory BBQ by the anti-immigrant group cited above.
They announce their picnic via a poster that boldly announces the BBQ
event to “Celebrate the Disappearance” and proclaims “It’s Our Country.”
Lila Rodríguez herself is a target of Mexican/Latino haters since a baseball
is thrown in her hospital room breaking a window and nearly hitting her. A
written message inscribed in the baseball reads: “Disappear Bitch. We don’t
want you back” (A Day without a Mexican).
Throughout the day Mexicans/Latinos keep disappearing: professional
workers such as teachers, television anchormen, baseball athletes, computer
technicians, policemen, musicians, agricultural workers, maids, car wash
attendants, restaurant workers, and others all vanish. The plot focuses particularly on one woman, Lila Rodríguez, who is the sole “Mexican” left in
California. She is involved in a car accident since the streets are in complete
chaos and ends up in the hospital where scientists begin to undertake tests
to determine why she has not disappeared also. It turns out that she is not
really a Mexican but an Armenian, thus demolishing the stereotype as to
how Mexicans are supposed to look. Other characters in the film include
members of the border patrol who, without undocumented Mexicans
crossing the border, begin to fear for their jobs.
The film’s form and content are excellent vehicles through which its
ideology is explicitly articulated. Louis Giannetti’s book Understanding
Movie defines ideology and offers insights into how ideological structures
are embedded within films:
[Ideology is] a body of ideas reflecting the social needs and aspirations of
an individual, group, class or culture. The term is generally associated with
politics and party platforms, but it can also mean a given set of values that
are implicit in any human enterprise—including filmmaking. Virtually
every movie presents us with role models, ideal ways of behaving, negative
traits, and an implied morality based on the filmmaker’s sense of right and
66
wrong. In short, every film has a slant, a given ideological perspective that
privileges certain characters, institutions, behaviors, and motives as attractive, and downgrades an opposing set as repellent.
In A Day without a Mexican the ideology is explicitly evident throughout
the film via the racial politics inscribed within it. If the chaotic conditions
extant in California after the Mexicans disappear, and which are offered to
the spectator via the movie camera’s lens, do not convey the message that
California cannot function without this ethnic group, additional explicitly
written reminders are given throughout the movie. At each important
point in the movie’s plot the action stops completely and written across
the screen are statistics or factoids purported to prove, from the director’s
point of view, the importance of Mexicans in California. Some of these
factoids inform us that
●
●
●
●
20 percent of the school teachers in California are Latino
Agriculture, not Hollywood, is the state’s biggest industry
60 percent of the construction trade is Hispanic
Mexicans/Latinos contribute 97 billion dollars to the economy
Even before A Day without a Mexican was released, controversy erupted
in Los Angeles, California. The advertisements for the film appeared on
large billboards along the freeways announcing, “On May 14, there will
be no Mexicans in California,” and in Spanish, “El 14 de mayo los gringos
van a llorar. [On May 14, the Gringos are going to cry.]” (A Day without
a Mexican).
The film underscores the fact that California is becoming increasingly
Mexican, and in fact rumblings of a future Mexican California have been
growing in the twenty-first century since the figures for the year 2000 census were released. For example, the Los Angeles Times’ headline on March
30, 2001, is attention-grabbing: “MILESTONES OF GROWTH AND A
NEW ETHNIC ORDER: THE SOUTHLAND’S CORE BECOMES MORE
ETHNICALLY AND RACIALLY MIXED, WITH LATINOS ASCENDANT
CALIFORNIA GROWS TO 33.9 MILLION: NO GROUP MAKES UP A
MAJORITY.”
Similarly, the Santa Barbara News-Press’s headlines for the same date as
above were equally focused on the census data collected in the year 2000
and released the previous day: “GOLDEN STATE SHIFTS TO MINORITY
MAJORITY,” “LATINO AND NORTH COUNTY POPULATIONS
BOOMING,” and “STATE’S 33.9 MILLION POPULATION NATION’S
LARGEST, MOST DIVERSE.” The Santa Barbara News-Press then furnished
(Giannetti 1999, 396)
67
more details regarding California’s population growth by highlighting
them on the front page of the March 30, 2001, edition in bullet format:
“California’s overall population grew 13.8 percent to 33.9 million people /
California’s Latino population soared by 43 percent over the past decade /
Nearly 1 of every 3 state residents is a member of the fast-growing ethnic
group / Of the 3.7 million residents in Los Angeles, about 1.7 million, or
47 percent, identified themselves as Latino.” For Santa Barbara county, the
above newspaper reports that “[a]bout 34 percent of all county residents
are Latino; Latinos make up about 50 percent of people under 18.”
The June 11, 2001, issue of Time magazine proclaimed on its cover in
multicolored lettering (red, white, and blue, the colors of the United States’
flag plus red and green, the colors of the Mexican flag): “WELCOME TO
AMEXICA.” And the subtext amplified: “The Border is vanishing before
our eyes, creating a new world for all of us.” What exactly is being suggested by newspapers and weekly magazines regarding the emergence of
“A Whole New World” in the twenty-first century? “A Whole New World”
is the title of the lead article featured in Time magazine exploring the cultural and economic transformations taking place along the U.S.-Mexican
border. The subtext hints at the answer: “Along the U.S.-Mexican border,
where hearts and minds and money and culture merges, the Century of
the Americas is born” (2001, 36).
Both the census statistics and the series of articles published in Time
magazine June 11, 2001, bearing the heading “New Frontier/La Nueva
Frontera,” point to the importance of Chicanos in California society.
The statistical calculations, percentages, and numbers underscore the
enormous shift in cultural, economic, racial, and social transformations
the state of California is experiencing in the twenty-first century. The
change in the composition of the Golden State’s population has been of
earthquake proportions, for, if we examine the census data taken ten years
earlier, we see the explosion in Latino population that has been taking
place.
The 1990 census recorded the white population at 57 percent and the
Latino population at 25 percent. In the 2000 census the white population
had decreased to 47 percent—a substantial 10 percent decrease—while
the Latino population surged to 29 percent of the total population of the
state. That percentage translates into 9.831 million Latinos of which 8.5
million are Mexican American or Chicanos. Contrary to the most common perception of the Latino population explosion, most of the growth
in this sector is attributed to a higher birthrate in this ethnic group than
to immigration.
The increasingly high numbers of the Chicano/Latino population in
California imply cultural transformations of seismic proportions. These
transformations are manifested culturally (language, food, architecture, music, film, literary production, and the fine arts) as well as in the
economic, social, educational, and political sectors. Chicanos have been
living in California since the Spanish explorers first set foot on its golden
shores and interior mountains and valleys in the eighteenth century.
Aside from the cultural and economic contributions Chicanos/as make
to California and the United States, they also offer a new paradigm of
human interaction based on the concept of mestizaje that can be defined
as the mixing of races and cultures and, more abstractly, as the breaking of
boundaries and barriers such as antimiscegenation laws established in the
colonial period by Spanish legal institutions. Mestizaje can be perceived
not as an essentialist mode of ethnic and/or racial identity but as a form
of cultural fluidity affording humans the potential for a more open way
of confronting and living reality. Through this mode of being, one can see
the possibilities of merging binary oppositions as well as promoting the
reconciliation of opposites and the blending of margins and centers.
Gloria Anzaldúa, a Chicana originally from Texas but living in northern
California for many years, has explored the concept of mestizaje in her
book Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza from multiple perspectives
including one that views it from an epistemological angle related to what
she calls “conocimiento” or “alternative ways of knowing that synthesize
(i.e., blend together) reflections within to create subversive knowledge systems that challenge the status quo” (Anzaldúa 1987, 5). The new mestizo
world order of the twenty-first century is one where, as Father Virgilio
Elizondo declares in his autobiographical book The Future Is Mestizo: Life
Where Cultures Meet, “We are moving from division to synthesis and from
separation to unity. Something quite new and unsuspected is taking place.
It is as exciting as it is mysterious, as painful as it is joyous” (Elizondo
2000, xiii). Father Elizondo recounts an epiphany he experienced in Paris
while observing the multitude of people walking along the streets and
boulevards of that great city. “It seemed,” he writes, “as if the whole world
were parading in front of me. Peoples from all the nations of the world were
experiencing a universal city, a place where boundaries did not exist, where
differences did not mean barriers. Could this city be symbolic of the future
of our planet?” (Elizondo 2000, xiii).
In a similar manner, Chicanos in California can be viewed as a possible
model for humanity since their multicultural and multiracial identity represents a new synthesis, a new beginning in the land where dreams become
a reality. Father Elizondo further elucidates this point:
68
In the southwest of the United States, the North of planet earth is meeting the South, and the result transcends old barriers by fusing North and
69
(Elizondo 2000, xv)
Father Elizondo thus proposes a world where “all may be one.” This dream
of the blending of cultures is becoming a reality as the new census figures
demonstrate.
The former Lieutenant Governor of California, Cruz Bustamenate,
the first Chicano elected to a major public office since 1878, reflects on
the new world order as evidenced in California: “The idea of having no
majority in California is something that’s been known to Californians for
more than a decade. The time has finally come for us to simply refer to
ourselves as Californians” (Santa Barbara News-Press 2001, A3). Elizondo
views the Chicano experience as a new model for humanity for it has the
potential to be inclusive, to tear down what Harvard University religious
studies scholar David Carrasco calls the “debilitating provincialism of the
white/black discourse” (2000, xvii). Carrasco exerts us to say “yes” to the
new mestizaje of democracy. He further comments:
We are entering the Brown Millennium. By Brown Millennium I mean the
type of hopeful and complex change . . . No more the color line as the only
defining symbol of race and culture in this country. No more the border
line as the primary defining political scar between Latin America and the
United States. Latinos are speaking with voices and living lives that combine
criticism and affirmation of the United States and ourselves.
(Carrasco 2000, xvii)
Carrasco perceives Latinos as the “unsplit.” “We are the shades!” he exults
(xvii) and views the Brown Millennium as encompassing all shades of
people: Asians, Africans, Europeans, and Latin Americans (xvii–xviii).
The above conceptualizations of mestizaje as a positive mode of perceiving the world can be viewed as a significant contribution Mexicans/Latinos
are making to U.S. society. However, Anglo-American society in California
and in the rest of the United States for that matter does not recognize the
many contributions Chicanos/as have made to this country. Mestizaje in
Anglo-American society has never been viewed as positive and thus the
fear of the “mongrel race” or the “half-breeds,” common terms with which
they have commonly characterized Mexican/Latinos in the past.
South into a new synthesis. In this portion of the earth, differences are
not destroyed, hidden, or ignored, they are absorbed to become the active
ingredients of a new human group. The borders no longer mark the end
limits of a country, a civilization, or even a hemisphere, but the starting
points of a new space populated by a new human group.
A Day without a Mexican underscores the fear Euro-Americans have
of Mexicans/Latinos since this ethnic group is viewed as utterly different
from white people, as George McClaire stated at the beginning of the film
(see above quote). The film further focuses on the population statistics
highlighting the growth of the Mexican/Latino sector and the threat this
growth implies for the “disappearing” Anglo-Americans. Nevertheless, its
explicit, overall message is that the Anglo hegemonic world is inextricably
intertwined with Mexicans/Latinos and further highlights the importance
of the latter two for the continued well-being of the state and the nation.
In A Day without a Mexican temporality is linked to history, but not
necessarily the history conceptualized in the term “historiography” or the
collection of static events and data. Temporality in the movie is presented
as an event that in fact reconstitutes reality so that reality is apprehended in
a different form, in a different light. Many of the characters, including Lila
Rodríguez, the main protagonist of the narrative, are living inauthentic time
because they are experiencing it as a series of moments without examining
their relationship to others. Particularly unexamined is the ruling society’s relationship to the Mexican American population and their human
dependence on them. They are living a typically unexamined life, and it is
the abrupt disappearance of this ethnic group for a twenty-four-hour time
period that jolts them into a new reality and eventually catapults them into
a new human understanding and interrelationship with the Other.
Lila Rodríguez, too, is forced to examine the past. Her internalized colonization is exhibited in her shame of being a Mexican when she was a young
girl and wanted to have a different set of parents who were not Mexican and
changed her name from Lila Rodríguez to Lyla Rod. We meet Lyla (Lila)
when she applies for a job as a reporter at the local Los Angeles television
station. The manager inquires about her name and she answers she is Lyla
Rod. Since the manager wants a “real” Mexican reporter, he wants to know
what her real name is, to which she replies: Lila Rodríguez. As an adult she
seems to have experienced a consciousness-raising regarding an appreciation for her Mexican background, although she recounts how when she was
a child she was ashamed of her Mexican parents. She tells Aunt Gigi that she
is being punished for having been ashamed of being Mexican:
70
I figured it out. God is punishing me. Why am I the only one left? I used to
make fun of mom and dad with my friends all the time. You know, I pretended my best friend’s parents were mine back in Junior High. You know
that photo of my parents. Well, I moved a little closer to my friend’s parents
so for as long that photo existed they would think I was their daughter and
not my mom and dad. I miss them! . . . I deserve it, I deserve it I do!
(A Day without a Mexican)
71
Nevertheless, as she matures she seems to return to her roots and embraces
her “Mexicanness.” Later, when she finally learns in the course of twentyfour hours, when Mexicans/Latinos have disappeared and she does not
disappear, that she is not biologically a Mexican since her parents were
Armenian, she experiences an epiphany: she realizes that there is no such
thing as an essentialized Mexican, that Mexicans can be of European
descent, of African descent, of Asian descent. To be Mexican is to be socially
constructed, and as such she is a Mexican. The film depicts Aunt Gigi (her
biological aunt) informing Lila that she is not a Mexican; that she is actually
Armenian. Lila rejects this new identity by asserting: “I was raised Mexican.
I was treated like a Mexican. My heart was born at 821 Margarita Street.
That’s where I learned to share my toys with the kids around me; to pick up
my own mess. Actions speak louder than words . . . You belong to the people
who taught you the world. My heart, my heart is Mexican!” (A Day without
a Mexican). When she realizes that culturally and at heart she is a Mexican,
at 3:00 a.m. she too disappears. At the end of the twenty-four-hour time
span all Mexicans reappear, but in the idealized world of the film, they
appear to a more authentic world, to a world that appreciates them more as
human beings, and to their rightful place in society.
The director/screenwriter Sergio Arau cleverly plays with time and
social issues in his film. Unfortunately, A Day without a Mexican was
not well received by Anglo-American critics, as evidenced by most of the
reviews that were quite acerbic and some downright racist. For example,
Meghan Clyne from the National Review Online wrote: “A Day Without
Misrepresentation. Not if you’re going to see A Day Without a Mexican . . .
If you live in New York, Chicago, Miami, San Antonio, or Austin, be forewarned: Hypocrisy and disinformation are coming to a theater near you”
(2004, 1). Achy Obejas, the Cuban American writer, had this to say: “[T]he
movie in its extended version is frequently muddled, emotionally messy, a
little heavy-handed and misses the real opportunity presented by the new
format” (2004). Joe Guzzardi, an instructor in English at the Lodi Adult
School in Southern California, wrote a review on the film that was published on the Internet on VDARE. This review was even more emphatic in
its criticism, calling the movie “foolish and insulting” and adding:
A more important point about Arau’s mindless movie: he did not portray
California without the many Mexicans who drain our social services and
disrupt our quality of life . . . Neither did Arau include the many Mexican
agitators and subversives living the high and mighty life in California while
they blatantly promote Mexico’s agenda. But I’ll play along with Arau (with a
twist or two of my own) by imagining a highly visible Mexican vanishing.
(Guzzardi 2004, 2; emphasis original)
Nevertheless, in spite of the savage criticism A Day without a Mexican
received, in analyzing the film’s text it is clear that the director Sergio
Arau and the cowriters Arau, Yareli Arzmendi, and Sergio Guerrero skillfully intersected time and a social critique of the treatment of Mexican/
Latino immigrants. The use of a twenty-four-hour time period provided
the director/screenwriters with a perfect forum through which a political
issue could be explored. And as pointed out earlier, the incorporation of
the literary technique of magical realism—which provides a suspension of
disbelief and simultaneously allows for reality to be incorporated within
it—allowed the political issue to be fully explored. In analyzing the use of
time in A Day without a Mexican, I suggest that it becomes an important
element in the structuring of the political elements the authors wished to
underscore in the film. It was a clever use of temporality framing a political
problem that is very much with us today in 2009.
The subject matter of the film was put to a test on May 1, 2006, when
immigrants both documented and undocumented mobilized nationally to
demonstrate against what they perceived as unjust and unfair immigration
laws. On that day a nationwide movement crystallized in the United States
under the banner of “A Day without Immigrants.” Massive demonstrations
took place throughout the United States and especially in large metropolitan centers such as Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York. Organizers
publicized a call via radio, newspapers, and television urging people not to
purchase anything on that day and not to show up for work. It called for
a boycott of school and work (Santa Barbara News-Press 2006). The film
evidently raised the consciousness of immigrants, who used the theme
featured in the film for their own political purposes. This call for “A Day
without Immigrants” came as a result of proposed legislation by the U.S.
Congress to make illegal immigrants, as they are called by the House of
Representatives, felons and to tighten the U.S.-Mexican border. Equally
upsetting was the proposal bandied around regarding the mass deportations of the 12–14 million undocumented workers in the United States
(newspapers are citing 12 million plus undocumented immigrants; Santa
Barbara News-Press 2006). In spite of the critical reviews the film received,
it has had a tremendous impact with respect to incorporating transnational
political issues from the screen to the streets two years later. The twentyfour-hour span resonated with immigrants in the United States as well as
did the concept of demonstrating their importance to the U.S. economy.
72
References
Anzaldúa, Gloria. 1987. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. San Francisco:
Aunt Lute Book Company.
73
Arau, Sergio, dir. 2004. A Day without a Mexican. http://www.esma.com/
adaywithoutamexican/cuerpo.htm
Carrasco, Davíd. 2000. Introduction. The Future Is Mestizo: We Are the Shades.
In The Future is Mestizo: Life Where Cultures Meet. Virgilio Elizondo, xvii–xviii.
Boulder: University Press of Colorado.
Clyne, Meghan. 2004. A Day without Misrepresentation. National Review Online.
http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/clyne200409170630.asp.
Elizondo, Virgilio. 2000. The Future is Mestizo: Life Where Cultures Meet. Boulder:
University Press of Colorado.
Giannetti, Louis. 1999. Understanding Movies. Upper Saddle River, New Jersey:
Prentice Hall.
Guzzardi, Joe. 2004. A Day without Mexican Consul General Rubén Beltrán.
VDARE. http://www.vdare.com/guzzardi/beltran.htm.
Herrera-Sobek, María. 1993. Northward Bound: Mexican Immigration in Ballad and
Song. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Los Angeles Times. March 30, 2001.
Maciel, David R., and María Rosa García-Acevedo. 1998. The Celluloid Immigrant:
The Narrative Films of Mexican Immigration. In Culture Across Borders: Mexican
Immigration and Popular Culture, ed. David R. Maciel and María Herrera-Sobek,
149–202. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.
Obejas, Achy. 2004. Movie review: A Day without A Mexican. http://chicago.
metromix.com/movies/review/movie-review-a-day/159010/content.
Santa Barbara News-Press. March 30, 2001.
Santa Barbara News-Press. April 30, 2006.
Time magazine. 2001. New Frontera/La Nueva Frontera: A Whole New World. June
11. 36–79.
Imagining Transnational
Chicano/a Activism against
Gender-Based Violence at the
U.S.-Mexican Border
Claudia Sadowski-Smith
S
ince 1993, hundreds of women have been killed or have disappeared
from Mexico’s largest northern border city, Ciudad Juárez.1 When
bodies are found, they often show signs of prolonged and savage torture,
(gang) rape, and mutilation. Many of the victims are young, recent arrivals from other parts of Mexico, and poor. About 20 percent worked in
Ciudad Juárez’s maquiladoras or assembly factories, where young women
from low-income families are most likely to find employment.2 Others
are students, dancers, homemakers, store employees, and prostitutes. The
few, seemingly haphazard convictions that have been handed down since
1999 have not stopped the violence. Instead, the murders have spread to
Chihuahua City, the capital of the state. Bodies are also now found in more
dispersed sites, and greater efforts are made to conceal them.
While the femicide was initially taken to be a Mexican problem, U.S.
journalists and academicians soon began to link the murders to the United
States’ economic involvement in drastic transformations of the Mexican
border region. Filmmakers, journalists, and writers/activists like Charles
Bowden, Ursula Biemann, and Debbie Nathan highlighted connections
between the U.S.-led industrialization of Mexican border towns like
Ciudad Juárez and the large-scale murders and disappearances of women.
These writers pointed out that, since the passage of the twin maquila
program in 1965 and its intensification in the 1994 North American Free
5
CLAUDIA SADOWSKI-SMITH
Trade Agreement (NAFTA), foreign businesses and investors have constructed large numbers of assembly factories along the U.S.-Mexican border. Even though many maquilas have been closed or have moved to other
parts of the world following the recession in the United States, Ciudad
Juárez continues to boast the largest number of maquilas in Mexico.
While the creation of a border economy based on for-export assembly
production has attracted migrants from central Mexico, the majority of
workers hired in the maquilas continue to be women. Many of them are in
their early twenties or younger, and some are below the legal working age of
sixteen.3 The women’s newfound economic independence and, often, their
ascendancy to positions of breadwinners of entire families have led to significant transformations in gender roles. Resentment of these changes has
spurred violence, which is often directed against women maquila workers.
The focus on the United States’ involvement in the creation of conditions enabling femicide soon came under fire for its failure to also examine the role of the Mexican nation-state. U.S.-based Chicano/a cultural
workers, activists, and academics were at the forefront of this critique.
Rosa Linda Fregoso, for example, has extensively criticized the “globalization narrative [that] fails to recognize multiple structures of oppression
in the lives of women and provides insular explanation for killings,” thus
“absolv[ing] the state of its complicity with feminicide” (2000, 142–143).
As Fregoso asked, if the growth of export-processing companies in Ciudad
Juárez were the only reason for the femicide, why are there “no similar
reports of mass murder of women in other parts of globe with similar
export-processing zones” (142)?
Fregoso’s criticism manifests ongoing changes in Chicano/a scholarship
from a focus on Mexican-descended people in the United States to a transnational lens that also includes developments in Mexico.4 Lourdes Portillo’s
2001 documentary Señorita Extraviada (Missing Young Women) exemplifies an important milestone in this transnationalization of Chicano/a
work, which adds developments outside the United States to an emphasis
on the diasporic nature of Chicano/as and Latino/as in the United States.
Self-identified as a Chicana, Mexico-born Portillo highlights the role of
Mexican governmental institutions, especially the police and the juridical
system, in covering up or even perpetuating femicide in Ciudad Juárez.5
Señorita Extraviada showcases the voices of surviving rape victims, victims’
families, and activists, who challenge official explanations of the murders.
As the film shows, the Mexican judicial police and a Special Prosecutor’s
office asserted that the crimes were solved as early as 1995 with the arrest of
an Egyptian-born chemical engineer who worked for a U.S. maquiladora,
named Abdel Latif Sharif Sharif.6 The case against Sharif was weak from
the beginning, and the killings continued. When a gang of drug dealers,
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called “Los Rebeldes” (the Rebels), and a group of maquila bus drivers,
nicknamed “Las Toltecas,” were arrested for more killings in 1996 and
1999, respectively, Sharif was characterized as the mastermind behind their
actions. He had supposedly paid the gangs to commit further murders so
he would appear innocent.7 In both cases, the arrested men soon recanted
their confessions, claiming they were extorted under torture.
As Portillo’s voiceover states at one point in the film, “[T]he facts of
the cases are whimsically constructed . . . I find myself mistrusting everything I am told. The only reliable sources come from the victims and their
families.” While these interviewees point to the role of governmental institutions in the femicide, some also allege the less-often discussed possible
involvement of drug traffickers and maquila employees.8 Because so many
actors are potentially in play, the crimes are difficult to solve. Portillo states
toward the end of film, “The question remains who are the killers, the
Egyptian, the bus drivers, drug traffickers, the police, or all of them?”9
Portillo’s emphasis on the Mexican dimensions of the murders has become
the catalyst for a surge in representations of the femicide by Chicano/a artists. Among these cultural productions are fictionalized accounts of gender
violence that address U.S. and especially Latino/a audiences in the United
States.10 This essay examines how three such recent Chicano/a representations of the murders—Gregory Nava’s film Bordertown (2006), Alicia Gaspar
de Alba’s Desert Blood: The Juárez Murders (2005), and Stella Pope Duarte’s If
I Die in Juárez (2008)—explore gender violence at the U.S.-Mexican border
from a transnational Chicano/a point of view that extends 1960s’ Chicano/a
struggles for multicultural recognition in the United States to events in
Mexico. This perspective creates two versions of transnationalism. First, the
three representations participate in the growing acknowledgement of the
transnational nature of the crimes and their perpetrators. By emphasizing
the crossborder connections that create the conditions for femicide, the two
novels and the film combine Portillo’s emphasis on the Mexican dimensions
of the murders with the earlier focus of U.S. and European representations
on the U.S. involvement in transformations along the border. The film
and the two novels thus indict, much more explicitly than Portillo’s documentary, the involvement of Mexican elites in the femicide, elites who are
becoming increasingly transnationalized through their growing ties to U.S.
corporate and political interests.11
Second, the three representations similarly articulate explicitly transnational Chicano/a forms of solidarity to highlight the political implications
of the femicide for Latino/as in the United States and also imagine ways to
protest the violence. Bordertown, Desert Blood, and If I Die in Juárez set out
to raise awareness of the atrocities among U.S. Chicano/as and move them
to action. The three representations thus participate in ongoing efforts to
IMAGINING TRANSNATIONAL CHICANO/A ACTIVISM
articulate a transnational Chicano/a cultural and political imaginary. Just
as feelings of belonging to a nation-state had to be created in the nineteenth century through representations in newspaper coverage as Benedict
Anderson famously argued, such a Chicano/a transnationalism needs to be
forged through representations, including fiction.
In Bordertown, Desert Blood, and If I Die in Juárez, attempts to forge
explicitly activist notions of transnationalism are central. Yet the three
representations imagine the grounds for such Chicano/a solidarity with
victims of the femicide very differently by articulation of what I term
“identificational” and “pluralist” forms of activism. Bordertown and Desert
Blood highlight pan-ethnic similarities among Mexican and Mexican
American women as potential victims of femicide in Juárez. They emphasize ethnic similarities among Mexican and Mexican American women
that put them in the position of potential victims of the Juárez femicide.
In both cultural productions, manifestations of violence against women
are recounted through the perspective of a middle-class Chicana protagonist in Mexico whose identification with the murder victims leads her to
individual forms of activism. This type of identificational transnationalism relies on what Angie Chabram-Dernersesian has, in a different context, called “seemingly transparent lines of panethnicity” (2003, 106) that
expand the 1960s’ Chicano cultural nationalist emphasis on shared ethnic
similarities among Mexican Americans (including Mexican immigrants
in the United States) to a transnational plane. This extension of theories
of ethnic identity in the United States to transnational forms of identificational politics, however, minimizes immense differences among the
fictionalized Chicano/a protagonists and the victims of femicide in terms
of their differential positions within an uneven global economy.
In contrast to such identificational forms of activisms, If I Die in Juárez
articulates similarities among Mexican women of different cultural and
ethnic backgrounds as the basis for collective forms of activism that
are then also open to participation by U.S. organizations and individuals. Duarte’s novel thus offers a “pluralist” corrective to identificational
forms of transnationalism that merely expand the emphasis on shared
ethnicity globally, but fail to acknowledge the privileges of Chicano/as as
First-World residents vis-à-vis citizens of Mexico and thus also ignore the
uneven character of ongoing processes of globalization.
78
1. Maquiladora Drivers and Mexican Elites in
Gregory Nava’s Bordertown
Chicano filmmaker Gregory Nava’s Bordertown portrays the Juárez femicide
through the perspective of a fictional Mexican American journalist who
79
gradually comes to identify with the femicide victims on the basis of shared
pan-ethnicity and gender. Born in Los Angeles of Mexican and Basque parents, Nava is well-known for his portrayal of Latin American immigration
and Latino/a culture in such films as his 1985 Oscar-nominated El Norte,
the generational drama My Family (1995), and Selena (1997), a film tracing
the story of Texas-born Tejana singer Selena Quintanilla-Pérez. Bordertown
constitutes a deliberate return to El Norte, as both films’ screenplays were
created from interviews—one with immigrants and the other with femicide
victims’ families and activists. For the role of Bordertown’s protagonist, Nava
approached Jennifer Lopez, who had also starred in his earlier films My
Family and Selena.
Despite what Nava has described as widespread interest in the movie
among Latino/as (Gerson), Bordertown did not find a distributor in the
United States. It was first screened at the Berlin International Festival in
2007, released only in European theaters, and then went directly to DVD.12
When the film was eventually shown in select Mexican theaters in May
2008, members of Ciudad Juárez’s activist organization Nuestras Hijas de
Regreso a Casa (May Our Daughters Return Home) received death threats
warning them not to attend the screenings. Journalists were also cautioned
against promoting the film. These threats occurred in a broader context of
violent attacks and legal pressure against social activists of all stripes as well
as intensified narco-violence in the state of Chihuahua (Anon. 2008).
In an interview with Nava before the screening, Ciudad Juárez’s El
Diario newspaper accused him of exaggerating the murders and profiting
from the suffering of the victims and their families. This statement draws
on opinions summarized in a 2006 report by the Procurador General de la
República (Mexican Federal Attorney General’s Office), which asserts that
the numbers of femicide victims are vastly exaggerated, that the majority of the deaths have been domestic violence cases, and that most of the
slayings have been solved (Washington Valdez 2006, 4). In response to
such accusations, Nava blamed Mexican authorities, free trade, and U.S.
companies for creating an environment in which women’s lives have no
value (Anon. 2008).
Nava develops his criticism of the Mexican government and its involvement in free trade throughout Bordertown. The film’s opening titles
place the femicide in the context of U.S. investment in maquilas. Perhaps
because it wants to be taken seriously as a film “inspired by actual events,”
as it insists in its opening, Bordertown fictionalizes a case in which maquila
bus drivers were convicted. To this emphasis on bus drivers, the film then
adds more speculative theories about possible connections between the
choferes (drivers) and transnational Mexican elites who have ties to U.S.
corporate and political interests.
In the opening scenes of Bordertown, a maquila bus takes a young factory worker, Eva Jiménez (played by Maya Zapata), on a detour to the
desert, where the woman is raped, beaten, and strangled by the driver and
a second man. Hers is the fictionalized story of a fourteen-year-old worker
in a U.S.-owned maquila, who, in 1999, was raped, strangled, and left for
dead in the Lote Bravo portion of the desert, where many victims have
been found. She miraculously recovered and named a maquila bus driver
who had picked her up from work in the early morning hours. When
Jesus Manuel Guardado Márquez, nicknamed “El Tolteca” or “El Dracula,”
was apprehended, he claimed he had consensual sex with the victim and
blamed a group of fellow bus drivers for her attempted murder. The group
was initially charged with the murders of six women, but the indictment
was later expanded to a total of 190 slayings. Even though the suspects
claimed to have been tortured and coerced into confessions, judges refused
to investigate their allegations. After six years in prison, Guardado was sentenced to 113 years in January 2005, while four other members of the gang
received verdicts of 40 years. One was found not guilty and released.
In Bordertown, the fictionalized version of these events, the victim’s fate
becomes inextricably linked to that of a Chicana reporter, Lauren Adrian,
who arrives in Ciudad Juárez to investigate the unsolved crimes. Besides
its overall questionable aesthetics, reviews of Bordertown have identified
the focus on Lauren as the film’s greatest weakness.13 As one critic wrote,
for example, Bordertown “is more interested in the banal inner life of its
protagonist than in the working and living conditions of the women in
the factories” (Funke 2007). While this assessment highlights Nava’s choice
to emphasize the perspective of a Chicana protagonist on the femicide, it
overlooks her role in exemplifying new notions of transnational solidarity
among Chicano/as and rape victims in Mexico on the basis of ethnic identification. Such a perspective expands on Nava’s first film El Norte, which
draws attention to Latin American immigration in order to articulate
notions of political unity among Latino/as in the United States, those who
have been here for generations and those who are newcomers in the country. Bordertown aims to extend this focus on Latin American immigrants
and Latinos in the United States to also include developments in Mexico.
Lauren’s investigation into the Juárez murders, particularly her attempt
to find the two men involved in Eva’s rape, evokes “half-remembered
memories” of her parents, Mexican farm workers in the United States,
whose untimely deaths caused her to be adopted by an Anglo family. The
film juxtaposes depictions of Eva’s rape with Lauren’s flashbacks to discovering her mother’s body and to observing her father’s accidental shooting death at the hands of a coworker who aimed at a pesticide-carrying
helicopter. The conditions under which her father was killed allude to the
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1960s’ grassroots organizing of César Chávez’s United Farm Workers in
response to the threat of pesticide poisoning. These activist struggles also
put in place an emphasis on a shared Chicano/a identity as the basis for
a political unity that become the basis for cultural nationalist versions of
Chicanismo.
Depicted as a career journalist, someone who had denied her Mexican
background “all her life” and who is more interested in covering the war
in Iraq than the femicide in Mexico, Lauren begins to acknowledge her
Mexican American identity in the course of her investigation into the murders. This newfound identity then serves as the basis for her identification
with femicide victims, which becomes complete toward the end of the film.
At this point, Lauren impersonates a maquila worker in order to find Eva’s
second rapist, the son of an elite family with connections to the maquila
industry. Scenes of Lauren’s attack by the same bus driver are overlaid with
representations of Eva’s earlier rape; Lauren here symbolically becomes a
femicide victim. As Lauren says after the attack on her, “everything was as
Eva told it. I felt like I was living her story.”
Even though the second rapist never materializes at the scene of
Lauren’s attack and the link between the bus driver and maquila owners
thus remains elusive, the story Lauren submits to her editor in the United
States insists on the role of Mexican elites and U.S. corporations in creating the conditions for the femicide. The article claims that “covering up
[the murders] is less expensive than protecting the women” as “everything
is about the bottom line.” In her exchange with her editor, Lauren explains
her new identificational politics saying that “I could be one of the women
in the factories. It could have been me in one of these graves.” But when
her newspaper refuses to print her article, Lauren discovers that Mexican
elites are not only protected by the Mexican government but also by U.S.
corporate and political institutions. Interested in expanding NAFTA to
South America, a U.S. senator with ties to Mexican maquilas had pressured the owners of Lauren’s newspaper into shelving her article to avoid
bad press for free trade. Lauren’s newfound view of herself as a potential
femicide victim eventually spurs her into personal forms of activism. The
film ends with her leaving her job at the Chicago paper and taking over a
progressive newspaper in Ciudad Juárez to pursue the kind of investigative
reporting that would help to “tell the truth about Juárez.”
This conclusion remains unconvincing, largely because the film refuses
to problematize Lauren’s identification with the Juárez femicide victims, which is based solely on her ethnicity and gender. While the film
articulates a poignant critique of the stark inequities that mark Mexican
society—juxtaposing lavish houses and opulent parties with red light
districts and the colonies where maquila workers like Eva live as well as
contrasting European-identified and indigenous Mexicans—it minimizes
the immense economic, cultural, and linguistic differences between the
Chicana reporter and the victims of femicide. Partially because of structural inequities between the two women, Lauren proves incapable of
emphasizing Eva’s description of the circumstances that have displaced her
from the state of Oaxaca to a city where her status as a poor indigenous
woman, a newcomer, and a maquila worker makes her the target of sexual
predators. Instead, Lauren condescendingly explains that the difference
between her work as a journalist and Eva’s job at a maquila is that she has
a “career.” Here the film glosses over Lauren’s immense economic and cultural privileges as a U.S. citizen (and also as the adopted child of most likely
well-to-do Anglo parents) that have allowed her to choose a path unavailable to Eva and that would have largely sheltered her from the status of a
femicide victim. Even though Bordertown presents a view of femicide that
urges U.S. Latino/as to become involved in transnational activism, the film
ends up reiterating the well-worn plot line of a hard-bitten First-World
journalist finding spiritual redemption and self-awareness by exposure
to, and empathy with, suffering in Third-World nations. Because the
diasporic Chicano/a perspective developed in Bordertown cannot account
for differences among women on both sides of the border and the FirstWorld privilege of Chicano/as, it is limited in its political efficacy.
2. Desert Blood: Mexican Elites and the U.S. Aspects of
the Juárez Femicide
Like Bordertown, Alicia Gaspar de Alba’s Desert Blood develops a transnational perspective on the Juárez femicide that highlights the involvement of
Mexican elites, many of whom are connected to the maquila industry, and
their ties to other transnational actors in the United States. Like Nava’s film,
Desert Blood is a fictionalized account by a Chicano/a artist that recounts
the murders through the point of view of a Chicano/a protagonist. Unlike
Bordertown, which insists that it is based on actual events, however, Desert
Blood begins with a “disclaimer” section emphasizing that the novel is a fictionalized account of the murders. The author writes that Desert Blood takes
liberties with chronologies, events, and characters, adding metaphorical
details to emphasize its theory of the identity of femicide perpetrators. Like
Bordertown, Desert Blood fictionalizes events of the mid- and late 1990s and
begins with a stark description of a sexualized killing. Already in the next
chapter, however, the novel switches to the point of view of the Chicana
protagonist, 31-year-old Ivon Villa, a visiting professor at a Los Angeles
college and a former resident of El Paso. Many of this character’s features
are modeled after Gaspar de Alba, who is originally from El Paso and now
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works as professor of English and Chicana/o Studies at the University of
California, Los Angeles. When she arrives to adopt a child in Ciudad Juárez,
Ivon becomes accidentally involved in an investigation into the femicide.
Before Ivon can see the pregnant mother of her adoptive child, who is a
maquila worker, she and her unborn baby are found murdered.
To this account of murdered Mexican maquila workers, Desert Blood
adds an emphasis on the U.S. aspects of femicide: the existence of U.S.
victims and the possible involvement of U.S.-based sexual offenders and
U.S. enforcement agencies in the killings. Like the unnamed victim with
whom the novel begins, Ivon’s sixteen-year-old sister Irene, who lives in
El Paso, disappears during a visit to the Juárez fair. The novel tells us that
Irene thus joins a small number of U.S. women of Mexican descent from
El Paso and Las Cruces, New Mexico, who disappeared or were killed in
Ciudad Juárez and have profiles similar to many of the Mexican victims
in terms of their appearance and age.14 In the course of her search for her
sister, Ivon discovers an elaborate network of killers. Drawing on the work
of journalist Diana Washington Valdez, whom Gaspar de Alba thanks in
her acknowledgement section, the novel fictionalizes a woman-killing
cartel made up of sons of influential families with ties to the maquiladora
industry. They shoot “snuff films” that chronicle the prolonged torture,
gang rape, disfiguration, and killing of young women by thugs who are
connected to the jailed “el Diablo” and act on behalf of Egyptian chemist Amen Hakim Hassan. This is a fictionalized reference to the alleged
connections between the convicted Egyptian scientist Abdel Latif Sharif
Sharif and Sergio Armendáriz Díaz, nicknamed “el Diablo,” the leader
of Los Rebeldes. Mexican police claimed that Armendáriz and his gang
ritually killed at least seventeen women for Sharif. Several of the victims
had bite marks all over their bodies, some matching Armendáriz’s dental
plates. In 2005, six members of the “Rebeldes,” including Armendáriz,
were convicted and sentenced to between twenty-four and forty years for
six murders.
The snuff films produced by Desert Blood’s fictionalized “juniors” are
streamed live over the Internet on a site bearing the name of Richard
Ramirez, a real-life convicted serial killer from El Paso. By linking the
femicide to the desire for economic gain from snuff films, the novel reiterates one of the vaguer references in Portillo’s documentary, which other
scholars of the Juárez femicide have, however, chalked up to the level of
urban myth (Nathan 2002). In addition to the juniors and the “Rebeldes,”
Desert Blood also fictionalizes the possible involvement of U.S. enforcement agencies, such as the Border Patrol. The chief detention enforcement
officer of El Paso is shown to participate in the abduction of women from
maquiladoras and public places in Juárez, and he also provides captured
undocumented women immigrants whom he is supposed to repatriate to
Mexico.
Desert Blood also adds another transnational explanation of the femicide, speculating that the murders may be an attempt to control women’s
reproductive function in both Mexico and the United States. The novel
asserts that maquilas ultimately profit from the serial killers’ way of “disposing . . . non-productive/reproductive surplus labor.” The novel further
elaborates on this connection by describing maquila workers as “[u]nderpaid, sexually exploited, forced to live in hovels made of maquiladora scrap
in the middle of the desert, their reproductive cycles under surveillance at
the factories where they worked” (Gaspar de Alba 2005, 331). And because
some of the women could potentially become U.S. immigrants, Desert
Blood speculates that U.S. institutions may also benefit from the killings as
they prevent the “infiltration by brown breeding female bodies” (333).
The novel’s emphasis on similarities among Chicano/as and Mexican
women as potential victims of femicide, however, translates only into
limited calls for transnational activism. In contrast to Bordertown, which
advocates the main character’s relocation to Mexico to conduct investigative journalism, Desert Blood’s Chicano/a protagonist abandons similar
inquiries so that she can resume her academic job in California. Irene’s
abduction, gang rape, and near death in an El Paso location are never
solved because some of the perpetrators are killed in a shootout with U.S.
police, and others simply disappear. In official U.S. accounts of the events,
the two Border Patrol agents involved with the women-killing cartel are
portrayed as undercover agents, and the Mexican “juniors” are never
mentioned. Ivon nevertheless decides to abandon her investigation into
her sister’s abduction, which already led her to possible links between the
cartel and the disproportionably high number of sex offenders in El Paso.15
Instead, Ivon decides to turn her experiences into a chapter of her dissertation, which provides her with a “chance to do something” (Gaspar de Alba
2005, 98) and to secure her financial future on a tenure-track academic
position. As Gaspar de Alba writes, “Ivon knew she could not allow herself
to become obsessed with solving the Juárez murders. She had responsibilities and obligations of her own. Irene was safe, and Ivon had to switch
gears now and focus on the dissertation” (Gaspar de Alba 2005, 328).
Perhaps the protagonist’s retreat to a secure financial future, which
includes pursuing a tenure-track job, buying a house, and adopting a child
from Mexico, merely represents a convenient plot device, designed to highlight the unresolved nature of most of the murders. But the novel never
critically comments on Ivon’s decision or on her consent to the kinds of
adoption practices that involve paying Mexican mothers a few thousand
dollars, bribing a nurse to forge birth certificates to get children across the
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border, and, if necessary, paying a mordida to the Mexican police. Ivon’s
attempt to procure a baby from a young maquila worker, who is described
as unable to care for her unborn child, is characterized as a way to help
“those poor women in Juárez” (Gaspar de Alba 2005, 64). And after the
mother and unborn baby are discovered dead, Ivon readily turns to the
three-year old son of a would-be maquila worker with terminal cancer,
who conceived the child as a result of experiments conducted by Egyptian
scientist Hassan. Loosely based on Sharif, Hassan experiments with
contraceptives and insemination, first on prostitutes and then on some
maquila applicants. Even though the child has a (admittedly less than
perfect) grandmother, the novel insists that only his adoption by Ivon will
save him from becoming one of the city’s “child prostitutes, drug runners,
or beggars” (Gaspar de Alba 2005, 82).
This fictional treatment participates in what Laura Briggs has identified as the sentimental narrative of transnational adoption. The portrayal
of adoption as a “child rescue mission,” she argues, enables U.S. American
parents to see themselves engaged in a humanitarian endeavor, while
the birth parents are usually portrayed as “(at best) happily sending
their children off to a land where they will have more material benefits”
(Briggs 2006, 7). As it perpetuates this view of adoption, Desert Blood fails
to address the unequal power relations among poor Mexican and wellto-do Mexican American women like Ivon that enable the exchange of
children for money—their commodification—in the first place. After all,
the adoption is enabled by the same conditions of inequity that also create the profits for transnational elites involved in maquila industries. The
parallelism between free trade and transnational adoption is also visible in
narratives about adoption that circulate in Latin American countries. Here
transnational adoption is, like free trade, often seen as an extension of U.S.
economic and military power, and it is frequently contextualized in relation to child kidnapping, prostitution, murder, and organ-theft—in short,
adoption is associated with some of the same ideas about global inequity
that have been linked to the Juárez femicide.
While Desert Blood supports the development of a diasporic Chicano/a
activism based on viewing Mexican women on both sides of the border as
(potential) victims of femicide, the novel fails to acknowledge the privileges Chicano/as hold vis-à-vis Mexican women, especially those who are
poor, as well as Chicana women’s participation in U.S. politics of domination, as U.S. citizens, in Latin America. Perhaps this oversight explains the
protagonist’s inability to imagine activism other than academic scholarship. That it is not sufficient, even for the author, becomes manifest in the
novel’s acknowledgement section, where Gaspar de Alba encourages the
audience “to join the friends and families of the dead and the disappeared
86
women of Juárez. Only in solidarity can we help bring an end to this pandemic of femicides on the border” (Gaspar de Alba 2005, 348).
Of the three cultural productions examined in this article, Stella Pope
Duarte’s novel If I Die in Juárez (2008) is the only one that refuses to
filter the Juárez killings through the lens of a Chicano/a protagonist or to
open with a sensationalized description of a serialized killing. Duarte is
of Mexican descent and a native of Phoenix, Arizona. Unlike Bordertown
and Desert Blood, which focus on maquila workers, her novel highlights
the diversity of Mexican femicide victims and the general similarities in
their economic status. The novel is attentive to the broad spectrum of killings associated with the term “femicide.” Not all of the murdered women
in the novel are victims of serialized killings; some fall prey to domestic
violence or revenge killings. Thus, one of the novel’s minor characters
resigns herself to the fact that she would “join hundreds of other women
who had been slain by their husbands and thrown into the desert to rot”
(Duarte 2008, 170).
If I Die in Juárez portrays ethnically and culturally diverse poor Mexican
women in Ciudad Juárez, whose limited options expose them to similar
forms of sexual violence and (near) death. The novel focuses on three
women whose lives become increasingly interconnected during the early
years of the femicide. Twelve-year-old Tarahumara Indian Mayela Sabina
and eighteen-year-old Petra de la Rosa, a mestiza of Tarahumara background, leave their villages in the state of Montenegro after NAFTA has
transformed farming there into an unsustainable economy. Upon their
arrival in Juárez, the women take very different paths, yet they still become
subject to similar forms of sexual abuse. After suffering harassment from
a relative’s boyfriend, Mayela is abandoned in an orphanage, where she
is sexually assaulted by its caretaker. Petra is exposed to constant sexual
harassment from supervisors at the maquiladora where she works. And
a third girl, 14-year-old Evita Reynosa, who grew up in one of Ciudad
Juárez’s colonies, is regularly beaten by her mother and sexually threatened
or abused by a neighbor, her mother’s boyfriend, and policemen. When
Evita gets involved with the prostitution and drug trade of one of Ciudad
Juárez’s many red light districts, she narrowly escapes becoming a victim of
the women-killing cartel fictionalized in the novel.
Unlike Desert Blood, which highlights perverted “juniors” and their
possible economic gain from snuff films, or Bordertown, which points to
connections among maquila drivers and “juniors,” Duarte’s novel highlights
3. If I Die in Juárez: Narco Trafficking and Mexican
Women’s Activism
87
the relationship of Mexican elites to drug trafficking. The leader of the fictionalized women-killing cartel, Agustín Miramontes Cortés Guzman, is a
“junior” who owns a maquiladora and is connected to “drugs, prostitution,
corruption” (Duarte 2008, 261). Miramontes procures his victims with the
help of people working in the red light zone and in maquiladoras. Evita
and other prostitutes are invited to a private party at his opulent villa in
one of Juárez’s richest neighborhoods. Here Evita is gang-raped, beaten,
drugged to the point of a near overdose, and left to die. Similarly, a maquiladora supervisor “selects” Petra for the Miramontes gang; he promises her
a job when he first meets her in Montenegro, quickly moves her up in the
hierarchy of the plant, based mainly on her “good looks,” and then introduces her to Miramontes, the new owner of the maquila.16 After abducting
her from her job, Miramontes and other men, including his U.S. business
partners, torture, rape, mutilate, and electrocute Petra for weeks.
Like Desert Blood, Duarte’s novel speculates that one motive behind
the femicide is the attempt to control women’s reproductive abilities.
Miramontes uses electrical currents to destroy his victims’ wombs, “where
he said were conceived the most despicable forms of life, clots of blood that
must be destroyed” (Duarte 2008, 307). When his victims are near death,
Miramontes hands them over to his driver and the fictionalized leader of
Los Rebeldes, who continue raping, torturing, and mutilating the women
and eventually dispose of their bodies in remote areas of the desert.
To oppose the killings, the novel focuses on women’s friendships and
collective forms of activism. Evita and Mayela piece together who has
abducted Petra, and are able to save her from being killed. Yet, after Petra is
found, the police fabricate a story about her “double life” as a prostitute, and
the murders continue. This is no surprise because the police not only protects Miramontes’s cartel, but individual policemen also participate in the
cartel’s atrocities, such as Evita’s rape at Miramontes’s private party. Unlike
Bordertown, which emphasizes the femicide primarily as a vehicle for the
internal transformation of a Chicano/a journalist, Duarte’s novel ends, like
Portillo’s documentary and Desert Blood’s acknowledgement, with a focus
on the collective activism of femicide victims and their relatives.
This activism is recounted by a female Mexican journalist, who only
appears in the novel’s epilogue. During her investigation into Petra’s disappearance, the reporter suffered a fate similar to that of the victims; she was
abducted, beaten, and threatened by the Rebeldes leader and Miramontes’s
chofer. In the epilogue, the journalist recounts that ten years after Petra’s
abduction, she created an activist organization, Mujeres Unidas de Juárez.
This organization also invites transnational forms of activism as it brings
together “groups of women from both sides of the border into an alliance
of courageous followers who took to the streets of Juárez determined to
88
4. The Political Efficacy of Imagined Diasporic
Transnationalisms
Produced by Chicano/a artists, Bordertown, Desert Blood, and If I Die in
Juárez articulate highly sophisticated theories of globalized conditions at
the northern Mexican border as a transnationalized space. The three representations highlight the transnational dimensions of the Juárez femicide,
particularly the involvement of Mexican elites who are connected to U.S.
corporate and political interests. As they fictionalize differently configured
transnational networks of perpetrators, the film and the two novels similarly suggest that the murders are deeply imbricated in the cultural, social,
and economic conditions of Juárez, which have been produced in the
interactions among increasingly transnationalized actors—governmental
institutions, corporations, and drug cartels.
The continuation of the femicide demonstrates the widespread acceptance of violence, particularly against poor women, by Mexican and U.S.
governmental institutions as well as transnational elites and businesses.
These actors have jointly transformed Ciudad Juárez into a transnationalized space in which serial murders of women go largely unpunished. It
is ironic that the labor of many of the female victims has produced the
wealth that has come with maquila industrialization, wealth that has been
distributed unevenly throughout Mexican society and throughout the
world. As Alicia Schmidt Camancho writes, the “acceptance of the femicide demonstrates the inability to imagine a female life free of violence in
a globalized society created largely by women workers” (2005, 267).
While the three representations similarly highlight the transnational
dimensions of gender violence by fictionalizing crossborder networks
of murderers, they articulate divergent forms of activism to oppose the
atrocities. Bordertown and Desert Blood emphasize the potential victim
status of Mexican and Mexican American women on both sides of the
U.S.-Mexican border as the basis for diasporic forms of solidarity. The fact
that, because of similar appearance, U.S. Latino/as may be mistaken for
the Mexican women who tend to be the subject of femicide—young, poor
arrivals from other parts of Mexico or prostitutes—enables the articulation
of theories of crossborder solidarity. As Gaspar de Alba poignantly writes,
U.S. American women of Mexican descent who are mistaken for “thin,
dark-skinned, dark-haired young Mexican [women]” become victims of
help in any way they could to end the murders” (Duarte 2008, 326).17 In
its emphasis on collective activism by Mexican women and their invitation
to U.S. allies, Duarte’s novel thus differs significantly from the forms of
identificational solidarity imagined in Bordertown and Desert Blood.
89
femicide alongside “muchachas del sur, girls from the south: poor, young
migrant women” (2005, 255). However, this identificational panethnic
transnationalism fails to address the immense differences between the
fictionalized middle-class Chicanas through whose perspectives the slayings are told and the poor Mexican women who have predominantly been
the victims of the killings. Their differences are rooted in deep inequities
between the United States and Mexico that have increased in the context
of a globalizing economy, and in the stark economic differences within
Mexico that have left so many women and their families impoverished,
allowing only a minute elite to prosper.
In contrast, Duarte’s novel focuses on similarities among mostly poor
Mexican women of different geographical, ethnic, and cultural backgrounds. Their organizing into collective forms of activism also takes on
transnational shapes as it invites the participation of U.S. groups. Duarte’s
attempt to understand the deep roots of femicide in a globalizing Mexican
society highlights what has, to date, been the most effective form of
activism—the creation of activist organizations by victims and their families. Some of their achievements have included changes in the police and
juridical system, such as the institution of a Special Prosecutor’s Office, the
modernization of police techniques, and the implementation of new procedures for the identification of victims. But despite these changes, most
of the murders have not been resolved.
The coverage that the activist organizations have received in the kind
of investigative news reporting and academic scholarship fictionalized
in Bordertown and Desert Blood has very much helped their cause. But
the notion of identificational forms of activism developed in Nava’s and
Gaspar de Alba’s work may not be the most effective basis for investigative
media and academic reporting. Perhaps these three divergent attempts
to establish a transnational Latino/a perspective on the serial killings
in Mexico spell the end of identificational forms of politics that have
attempted to simply extend the emphasis on ethnic identity from 1960s’
civil rights struggles to the transnational plane, while failing to explore
the privileges of First-World citizenship vis-à-vis Third-World denizens.
As Pheng Cheah has recently asked in a different context, “[I]n an uneven
world how can struggles for multicultural recognition in constitutionaldemocratic states in the North be brought into a global alliance with
postcolonial activism in the periphery?” (2006, 42). Just as feminist work
has had to recognize the limits of identificational approaches by addressing various ethnic, racial, and economic differences among women in the
so-called First and Third Worlds, a transnational activism to counter the
Juárez femicide may need to reach the level of activism described by Bina
Agarwal. An Indian economist, she has described effective transnational
90
Notes
1. Figures for the casualties of femicide vary greatly—between 200 and over
400—and so do definitions of victims (Ensalaco 2006, 419; Washington Valdez
2006, 63; Acosta 2005). In 2002, Debbie Nathan argued that only about 80
victims fit the scenario of young women who vanish without a trace and are
later found in the desert. Higher numbers also include “the married women,
the cohabiting women, the women with lots of kids, the middle-aged women,
the old women, the exotic dancers—and yes, even the prostitutes—whose
bodies have also been strewn across Juárez by their lovers, husbands and kin.”
This view is in line with a 2003 Amnesty International report stating that
motivations for the killings have varied from domestic violence, drug-related
executions, gang shootings, and sexual assaults, but that a number of the killings has followed a pattern in which young women disappeared and were later
found raped and murdered (Rodriguez 2007, 249).
2. For statistics on maquiladora workers among the murdered women, see
Monárrez Fragoso 2003; Volk and Schlotterbeck 2007.
3. In 1999, routine state inspections of 500 businesses in Ciudad Juárez uncovered more than 550 workers below legal age. Maquila workers as young as
twelve were found raped and murdered (Rodriguez 2007, 143, 133).
4. The shift to a transnational lens has occurred relatively recently. As BruceNovoa (1990) has shown, for example, in Chicano/a cultural productions
throughout the 1980s, Mexico only figured metaphorically as a source of nostalgia for a lost paradise for Chicano/as or of disillusioned encounters between
Chicano/a or Mexican American protagonists. Mexican theorists, such as María
Socorro Tabuenca Córdoba (1995), have also critiqued the tendency to employ
Mexico merely as a metaphor for U.S.-specific preoccupations and theories.
Alberto Ledesma (2002) draws attention to the still missing diasporic lens on
similarities among Mexican undocumented immigrants and Chicano/as.
5. Now in her fifties, Portillo moved with her family from Mexico to Los Angeles
when she was thirteen years old.
6. After his release in 1996, Sharif was rearrested under new charges for the
murder of a seventeen-year-old computer school student and maquila worker,
which led to his conviction in 1999.
7. Since the completion of Portillo’s documentary, the inconsistencies in the case
against Sharif won him a reduction of his sentence to twenty years in 2003.
But in 2006, Sharif died in maximum security jail at the age of fifty-nine. After
serving eleven years of his prison term, he could have been on the verge of
work across global inequities this way: “[A]mong the women’s groups
there is growing recognition of the importance of forging strategic links
[among Northern and Southern women]. One could say ‘romantic sisterhood’ is giving way to ‘strategic sisterhood’ for confronting the global crisis
of economy and polity” (qtd. in Ong 2006, 31).
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
16.
91
winning his freedom; a judge was about to rule on Sharif ’s case within a week
or two of his death.
While activists and academicians long dismissed the role of the drug trade in
the slayings, Diana Washington Valdez believes that it is above all the cartel’s
corruption of police and officials that partially explains the persistence of
femicide (2006, 177).
Debbie Nathan has criticized Portillo’s film (for which Nathan initially worked
as a researcher) for falling victim to speculations about “serial killers, several
serial killers, the police, bus drivers, satanists, pornography makers, body
organ traffickers,” and murderers “capturing and killing girls in order to make
highly profitable ‘snuff films’” (2000).
See, for example, Rubén Amavizca’s play “The Women of Juárez” (“Las Mujeres
de Juárez”; 2004) and Lorena Mendez-Quiroga’s play Border Echoes (“Ecos de
Una Frontera”; 2007).
Theories indicting the Mexican elite were popularized by U.S. journalist Diana
Washington Valdez in her 2003 book The Killing Fields: Harvest of Women.
Washington Valdez believes that while Columbian-based drug gangs committed some of the murders, others were carried out by a cult of powerful multimillionaire businessmen, the sons of influential families, who have learned they
are above the law and can pick their victims without fear of arrest. Such theories have also found Mexican adherents. For example, Jorge Campos Murillo,
a federal deputy attorney general in Mexico City, identified “juniors”—sons
of wealthy Mexican families whose money and connections had spared them
from prosecution. After making this announcement at a press conference in
Mexico City in early 2002, Campus was reassigned to another unit within the
Federal Attorney General Office in Mexico City and has since then refused all
interviews (Washington Valdez 2006, 136). Jennifer Lopez has acknowledged
Washington Valdez’s work in an Amnesty International news release, and
Gaspar de Alba thanks the journalist in the acknowledgment section of her
novel.
At the Berlin Film Festival, Lopez received the “Artists for Amnesty” award from
Amnesty International. Bordertown is also featured on Amnesty International’s
website. Artists for Amnesty, the Hollywood arm of Amnesty International,
read the screenplay for accuracy.
The film received overwhelmingly negative reviews and was greeted with boos
and muted applause at its world premiere in Berlin, Germany (Anon. 2007).
For example, in 1996, the bodies of two El Paso sisters, Victoria and Pearl
Parker, were found in Juárez (Washington Valdez 2006, 83).
The novel here reiterates the opinion of some Mexican and U.S. officials that
registered sex offenders from El Paso County are responsible for killing women
in Ciudad Juárez (Washington Valdez 2006, 155).
That victims may be set up by maquiladora employees was also suggested by
one of the activists interviewed in Portillo’s documentary. She speculates that
the women were chosen on the basis of pictures taken by maquiladora photographers.
92
17. The mention of U.S.-based groups could be a reference to organizations,
such as Amigos de la Mujeres de Juárez or Justice for the Women in Juárez
(Los Angeles).
Acosta, Mariclaire. 2005. The Women of Ciudad Juárez. Center for Latin American
Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. Policy Papers 3. http://
repositories.cdlib.org/clas/pp/3.
Amavizca, Rubén. 2004. The Women of Juárez (“Las Mujeres de Juárez”). Los
Angeles: Teatro Frida Kahlo Theater.
Anon. 2008. Death Threats and Email Warnings in Juárez. Frontera Norte Sur.
May 23. http://www.newspapertree.com/news/2481-death-threats-and-e-mailwarnings-in-juarez.
———. 2007. Bordertown Booed at Berlinale. Spiegel Online International.
February 16. http://www.spiegel.de/international/0,1518,466779,00.html.
Biemann, Ursula. 1999. Performing the Border. New York: Women Make Movies.
Bordertown. 2007. Dir. Gregory Nava.
Bowden, Charles. 1998. Juárez: The Laboratory of Our Future. New York: Aperture
Books.
Briggs, Laura. 2006. Making American Families: Transnational Adoption and U.S.
Latin American Policy. In Haunted By Empire, ed. Ann Laura Stoler, 606–642.
Durham: Duke University Press.
Bruce-Novoa, Juan. 1990. RetroSpace: Collected Essays on Chicano Literature,
Theory, and History. Houston: Arte Público.
Chabram-Dernersesian, Angie. 2003. Latina/o: Another Site of Struggle, Another
Site of Accountability. In Critical Latin American and Latino Studies, ed. Juan
Poblete, 105–120. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Cheah, Pheng. 2006. Inhuman Conditions: On Cosmopolitanism and Human Rights.
Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Duarte, Stella Pope. 2008. If I Die in Juárez. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.
Ensalaco, Mark. 2006. Violence against Women: Murder in Ciudad Juárez: A Parable of
Women’s Struggle for Human Rights. Violence Against Women 12.5: 417–440.
Felperin, Leslie. 2007. Bordertown. Variety. February 15. http://www.variety.com/
index.asp?layout=festivals&jump=review&id=2478&reviewid=VE1117932825
&cs=1&p=0.
Fregoso, Rosa Linda. 2000. Voices Without Echo: the Global Gendered Apartheid.
Emergences 10.1: 137–155.
Funke, Thorsten. 2007. Bordertown. February 3. http://www.critic.de/filme/detail/
film/bordertown-787.html.
Gaspar de Alba, Alicia. 2005. Desert Blood: The Juárez Murders. Houston: Arte
Público Press.
Gerson, Daniela. 2007. Bordertown Premieres at Berlinale: A Filmmaker’s Crusade
to See Justice Done. Spiegel Online International. February 15. http://www.spiegel.
de/international/0,1518,466465,00.html.
References
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Ledesma, Alberto. 2002. Narratives of Undocumented Mexican Immigration as
Chicana/o Acts of Intellectual and Political Responsibility. In Decolonial Voices:
Chicana and Chicano Cultural Studies in the 21st Century, ed. Arturo J. Aldama
and Naomi H. Quinonez, 330–354. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Mendez-Quiroga, Lorena. 2007. Border Echoes. Peace at the Border Productions.
Monárrez Fragoso, Julia. 2003. Serial Sexual Femicide in Ciudad Juárez, 1993–2001.
Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies 28.2: 153–178.
Nathan, Debbie. 1999. Work, Sex and Danger in Ciudad Juarez. NACLA Report on
the Americas 33.3: 24–31.
Nathan, Debbie. 2002. Missing the Story. Texas Observer. August 30. http://www.
texasobserver.org/article.php?aid=1011.
Ong, Aihwa. 2006. Neoliberalism as Exception: Mutations in Citizenship and
Sovereignty. Durham: Duke University Press.
Portillo, Lourdes. 2001. Señorita Extraviada. New York: Women Make Movies.
Rodriguez, Teresa. 2007. The Daughters of Juárez: A True Story of Serial Murder
South of the Border. New York: Atria Books.
Schmidt Camacho, Alicia. 2005. Ciudadana X: Gender Violence and the
Denationalization of Women’s Rights in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico. CR: The New
Centennial Review 5.1: 255–292.
Tabuenca Córdoba, María Socorro. 1995. Viewing the Border: Perspectives from
“the Open Wound”. Discourse 18.1–2: 146–168.
Volk, Steven S., and Marina E. Schlotterbeck. 2007. Gender, Order, and Femicide:
Reading the Popular Culture of Murder in Ciudad Juarez. Aztlán: A Journal of
Chicano Studies 32.1: 53–84.
Washington Valdez, Diana. 2006. The Killing Fields: Harvest of Women: The Truth
about Mexico’s Bloody Border Legacy. Los Angeles: Pace at the Border.
Precursors of Hemispheric
Writing: Latin America, the
Caribbean, and Early U.S.
American Identity
Gabriele Pisarz-Ramírez
P
ostrevolutionary American writing does not have a strong tradition of
being linked to the transnational. Texts that discursively cross national
borders or that blend and mix different cultures and histories are usually
related to the late nineteenth, the twentieth, or the twenty-first centuries.
The “transnational turn” that has been identified in American studies
by various critics, if it is put into a historical dimension at all, is mostly
traced back to late nineteenth and early twentieth-century developments
(Fisher-Fishkin 2005; Elliott 2007). Scholars such as Anna Brickhouse
therefore speak of a widely spread “presentism” of transnational analyses
based on the assumption that “literary transnationalism in the Americas
and the critical perspectives it invites are natural outgrowths of the massive human migrations, urban pluralism, and cultural globalization the
hemisphere has witnessed over the course of the twentieth century” (2001,
407). As Brickhouse continues, many of the literary configurations that are
linked by critics to the twentieth century “were in fact addressed by writers
in the Americas as explicit questions and problems well before the modern
and contemporary periods to which they have largely been consigned”
(2001, 408).
Given that the critical vocabulary and the major strategic approaches of
transnational studies have developed over the past few decades, the question arises what it means to look at transnationalism historically. Can we
6
GABRIELE PISARZ-RAMÍREZ
simply replace national perspectives on earlier periods in American history
and culture with transnational ones, and what do we gain by doing this?
In a recent essay, Frank Kelleter has taken up this question, pointing to
the fact that a mere application of contemporary critical methods to the
study of the early national period is little productive. As he states, “[T]
ransnational approaches . . . in their current form and institutionalization . . . trigger critical practices unable to answer—and sometimes even
to ask—the relevant questions” (Kelleter 2007, 29). One reason for this,
Kelleter observes, is that transnational scholarship usually proceeds from
the assumption of a constructed coherent national identity (which it then
sets out to deconstruct), without asking how and under which circumstances this construction had emerged (30). The increased interest in the
deconstruction of the ideological foundations of American exceptionalism
has privileged approaches that view the nation as an ideological fiction
and whose main interest lies in exposing the nation to be not an inherent,
but an “imagined community.”
Relevant historical transnational research, then, needs to study the
conditions and specific situations that guided the emergence of the nation
and of national identity constructions, conditions and situations that are
to be found both within the nation’s borders and without. U.S. American
national identity, from its emergence in the late eighteenth century, was
negotiated in the context of transnational interrelations, a fact that has
long been occluded by early American studies’ focus on investigating the
roots of American exceptionalism and on identifying specific features of
an “American mind.” Even in more recent approaches that acknowledge
the variety and heterogeneity of early American views and agents, scholarly attention, as Michael Drexler has pointed out, has often focused on
texts that were constitutive in “producing” the nation as an ideological
construct (2003, 14). This focus on the constructedness of the nation
precluded or at least marginalized the study of extranational contexts and
events that have impacted upon the formation of a national identity, a
circumstance that may have “postponed” early American studies’ access
to transnationalism. The question of what Americans saw when they
looked beyond the borders of the former thirteen colonies—not only geographically, but also temporally—and in which ways this gaze has formed
national identity constructions has only begun to be explored.
Frank Kelleter names the French Revolution as one major transnational
factor in the construction of a specifically American identity, which forced
Americans to become aware of the differences between “contemporary
European conceptions of nationhood and national identity” and their own
“practices of national invention, modes of national contestation, and ideologies of national distinctiveness” (2007, 31). While I agree with Kelleter,
96
97
I will suggest in the following that American national identity was not only
constructed in contradistinction to England or Europe, but in the context
of the United States’ position in the Western Hemisphere. Latin America
and the Caribbean were crucial in the processes of inventing and negotiating a national identity that was still far from being coherent, and American
authors participated with their writings in these negotiation processes.
In exploring postrevolutionary literary culture in a hemispheric context,
I am greatly indebted to the research that has been done in the field of
nineteenth-century hemispheric studies and that has addressed the interconnectedness of nineteenth-century U.S. literary culture in a trans-American cultural network. I would like to refer in particular to two important
studies, Kirsten Silva Gruesz’ Ambassadors of Culture: The Transamerican
Origins of Latino Writing (2002) and Anna Brickhouse’s Transamerican
Literary Relations and the Nineteenth Century Public Sphere (2004). Gruesz
in her book reenvisions the American Renaissance in the context of the
nation’s relation with its Southern neighbors, proposing to shift the attention from the conventional landmarks of nineteenth-century history such as
Jacksonian individualism, the Civil War, and the rise of urban industrial capitalism to moments equally significant for the intellectual and cultural life
of the period such as the Monroe Doctrine, the U.S.-Mexican War, as well as
the filibustering of North Americans in Central America and the Caribbean.
She outlines a hemispheric Spanish-language print culture reaching from
New York to Cuba to Mexico City and shows how it was linked to AngloAmerican literature and print cultures. From this perspective Gruesz calls for
“a new geography of American literary history that emphasizes its formation
within and around a culture of the Americas” (2002, 6). In a similar vein,
Anna Brickhouse in her study stresses the unstable boundaries of nation
within a New World arena characterized by the overlap and simultaneity of
different national claims upon territories as well as upon texts and traditions
(2004, 7). She argues that trans-American literary relations in the nineteenth
century and especially in the years between the Congress of Panama (1826)
and the Continental Treaty (1856) considerably influenced the public
sphere. Brickhouse contends that the American Renaissance—usually seen
as a national literary phenomenon—should actually be reconfigured as a
trans-American Renaissance, characterized by literary border crossing and
exchange. As she shows, even some of the most influential writers of the
period—Hawthorne, Cooper, Bryant, Melville, and others—were embedded
within a hemispheric network of literary cultures and lines of influence that
“provide crucial ways of understanding and delineating their character as
national writers” (Brickhouse 2004, 10).
While my own work profits immensely from the insights of these books,
I would like to add to their trans-American explorations by focusing on
PRECURSORS OF HEMISPHERIC WRITING
the decades between the 1780s and the 1830s as the period in which major
processes of national identity formation took place. Even if this period
did not produce literary exchanges between the United States and the rest
of the Americas in the same way as described by Gruesz and Brickhouse
for the subsequent decades, it was by no means a period in which
American writers ignored their hemispheric neighbors. Early American
authors imagined America as a hemisphere even before the era of largescale expansionism. In a period when national borders were still flexible
and subject to change, the American continent was often conceived of as a
single entity made up of both North and South America. Thomas Paine’s
famous observation, in Common Sense, that it was absurd for a continent
to be governed by an island was an expression of British Americans’ collective self-image that considered the inhabitants of the British colonies
as representatives of the entire Americas. Especially after the end of colonial rule, U.S. Americans saw themselves as part of a natural geographic
entity—the American landmass—rather than of a nation bounded by the
political borders prescribed by the former colonies. Moreover, both the
early imperial ambitions of Jefferson and his contemporaries as well as
the desire of the postcolonial nation to keep European powers at bay led
to the notion that the United States had to act as the unrivaled power on
the continent. The presence of Spain as a competitor on the American
continent as well as the Haitian Revolution as an event that shook the
entire slave-holding Americas influenced and shaped identity discourses
in the young republic. Latin America and the Caribbean, then, were
discursive reference points both as potential spheres of influence for the
young nation and as sites of projection for the negotiation of national
and group identities.
In this essay, I will look at texts by American writers from different
backgrounds that were written between the 1780s and the 1830s. I aim to
demonstrate that Latin America became a transnational point of reference in texts by the revolutionary writers Joel Barlow and Philip Freneau,
by the “father of American theatre,” William Dunlap, and by the first
U.S. novelist who depicted Mexico, Timothy Flint, each of whom makes
different uses of the extranational territory he refers to. In the period
under study there is a move from the epic glorification of pre-Columbian
cultures (Barlow, Freneau) to the operatic and romanticized rendering
of the conflict between Spaniards and Incas (Dunlap), to the celebration
of American enterprise and Republicanism against the background of a
backward and uncivilized early nineteenth-century Mexico (Flint). The
Caribbean, in turn, constitutes a discursive lacuna in the early nationalist
texts. However, as I will point out, the West Indies, and specifically the
Haitian Revolution, became a source of empowerment in early African
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American activist texts, even before the period of abolitionist activism in
the 1830s to 1850s. In texts published in the first African American newspaper, Freedom’s Journal, free African Americans look across the nation’s
borders to Haiti and to South American countries where slavery was
declared illegal, using this transnational perspective to create alternative
visions of community and identity that diverge from dominant national
narratives.
In 1786, Philip Freneau, one of the most important voices of revolutionary America, published a revised version of an epic poem that he had
first composed together with Henry Hugh Brackenridge as a commencement poem in 1771. The 1786 version of “The Rising Glory of America”1
creates a line from America’s pre-Columbian past to its glorious millennial
future. It positions Columbus at the beginning of a narrative of progressive
history of the continent that culminates in a vision of the United States as
the New Jerusalem, a land predestined to be the site of a new paradise due
to its “innocent” character. In a manner similar to Freneau’s, Joel Barlow’s
epic “The Vision of Columbus” (1787) links Columbus to the history of
pre-Conquest civilizations in Peru, detailing the life stories of the mythical
founder of the Incan dynasty, Manco Capac, and of his wife Mama Oella,
who are presented as key figures in an indigenous myth of the New World.
The epic has Columbus look both backward to the Incan civilizations and
forward to the emergence of a magnificent American empire that eclipses
the achievements of European civilization.
As Kenneth Silverman has observed, after the American Revolution, the
epic became “the showpiece of the new nationalism in America” (1976,
499). The need to create an exceptionalist New World history that differed from that of its motherland, England, led authors such as Barlow
and Freneau to frame the American Revolution as a historical event of
epic proportions, thus refuting European claims of superiority. One way
of integrating the recent revolution with a history that provided both historical fact and mythical grandeur was to claim pre-Columbian cultures
as part of the emerging nation’s tradition and history. Both Freneau and
Barlow looked to Aztec and Incan civilizations as a “usable past,” foregrounding the fame and splendor of these ancient and bygone cultures.
Striving to create a counterimage to the common European view of
America as a place void of culture or tradition, Freneau, in “The Rising
Glory of America,” uses the civilizations of Peru and Mexico to highlight the differences between “virtuous” America and greedy and profitoriented Europe. While Freneau suggests that Spain destroyed Incan and
Mexican civilizations to acquire riches, he denies that North America has
such base motives, as it prospers through agriculture and industry, not
through robbery. Talking about Cortez and Pizarro, “[w]hom blood and
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Such is the curse, Acasto, where the soul
Humane is wanting—but we boast no seats
Of cruelty like Europe’s murdering breed—
Our milder epithet is merciful,
And each American, true-hearted, learns
To conquer, and to spare; for coward souls
Alone seek vengeance on vanquish’d foe
(Freneau 1786, 50; italics added)
Barlow’s The Vision of Columbus goes even further than merely positing
the Incas and Aztecs as civilizations in ruin because of European greed.
His presentation of the Incan leader Manco Capac suggests that the Incas
had established a nation that could measure up to any myth of origin from
Europe. Presenting him as a reasonable and benevolent monarch, Barlow
suggests that Capac is at least comparable (if not superior) to European
mythical figures (Wertheimer 1999, 65–74). As Ralph Bauer has observed,
Barlow was cognizant of earlier European texts written by eyewitnesses
of the Conquest, such as Bartolomé de las Casas’ Brevísima Relación de
la destrucción de las Indias (1552) and the Inca Garcilaso de la Vega’s
Comentarios Reales de los Incas (1607). As Bauer argues, Barlow borrowed
countercolonial rhetorical strategies from these New World writers and
thus “de-center[ed] the telos of European providential history,” offering “a
linear and progressive concept of time for a New World age” (1995, 206).
Appropriating and promulgating the classical and Renaissance concept
of translatio studii (or translatio imperii)—a concept suggesting a linear
movement of progress of civilization from east to west—Barlow was convinced that North America was the natural future site of progress and that
the United States would eventually take the place of the most advanced
nation regarding culture and the arts.
While Freneau and Barlow praised pre-Conquest native populations,
they were quite explicit about the difference between the Peruvian and
Mexican cultures and North American Indians. As Freneau’s narrator
observes, whereas Aztecs and Incas were builders of great civilizations, North
American Indians had neither “towns” nor “arts”:
murder only satisfied, / And all to glut ambition!” Freneau points out the
different mentality of Americans:
But here, amid this northern dark domain
No towns were seen to rise.—No arts were here;
The tribes unskill’d to raise the lofty mast,
Or force the daring prow thro’ adverse waves . . .
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As Eric Wertheimer has revealed, the poem in this passage diverges considerably from the 1771 version, where this difference between northern
and southern Indians was not made. The new hierarchy in the evaluation
of native peoples had become necessary, as Wertheimer argues, since the
oppressive policies toward Native Americans could no longer be placed
in British responsibility (1999, 26). Like Freneau, Barlow casts the preConquest native civilizations as noble and equal to Europeans in their
degree of cultivation, while at the same time presenting North American
Indians as savages. The latter are described as “painted chiefs, in death’s
grim terrors drest” who “rise fierce to war, and beat the savage breast”
(Barlow 1787/1992, 49). But while Barlow presents Native Americans
as barbarous, he also, as Danielle Conger has observed, depicts them as
“vanishing Indians,” whose numbers are constantly diminished by “pale
diseases” that “float in every wind,” (Barlow 1787/1992, 53) a condition
that allowed him to deconstruct the image of the “red devil” and to mourn
the cultural loss of an American treasure (Conger 1999, 565). This contradictory presentation of the Indians is representative of the changing view
of these populations in the late eighteenth century’s public mind as tribes
were slowly displaced geographically and ceased to be perceived in the
public image as a serious danger.
The desire for a “noble past” embodied in pre-Conquest civilizations
was so strong that even imported texts were used to serve this purpose.
William Dunlap, known as the “father of the American theatre,” envisioned
a national theater that could serve as a “site for the permanent rehearsal and
renewal of emerging civic and national characters” (Rinehart 2001, 268).
Apart from writing plays himself, Dunlap translated and adapted a large
number of German, French, and British plays for the American stage, among
them the German dramatist August von Kotzebue’s Die Sonnenjungfrau and
Die Spanier in Peru oder Rollas Tod (1796), which were both set in Peru. In
Dunlap’s versions, the plays were entitled The Virgin of the Sun and Pizarro
in Peru or The Death of Rolla.
Whereas The Virgin of the Sun spotlights the unspoiled life of innocent noble savages in an exotic and idyllic landscape, the plot of Pizarro
in Peru circles around morality and the heroism of the Peruvian leader
Rolla. While both plays celebrate the victory of morality over corruption,
of humanity over cruelty, here I will concentrate on Pizarro in Peru as the
more well-known play. In Pizarro in Peru, the Spanish conqueror attacks
the Incan band led by the Spanish Alonzo de Molina and the Indian Rolla.
This indicates they were a different race;
From whom descended ’tis not ours to say—.
(Freneau 1786, 56–57)
While Alonzo is arrested, Rolla manages to flee and later saves the child of
Alonzo and his Peruvian wife Cora from the Spaniards. Although severely
wounded, Rolla is able to return the child to Cora before he dies. The play
establishes Rolla as a virtuous hero who although given the opportunity to
kill the defenseless Pizarro in his sleep, declines to do so in order to stay loyal
to his moral principles. Pizarro in Peru sets the honest and heroic Indians,
along with the equally heroic Alonzo, who fights with the Indians rather
than disgrace himself by serving the greedy Spaniards, against Pizarro and
his soldiers, who epitomize the black legend of Spanish cruelty against
native populations. Significantly, Pizarro in Peru pairs the unscrupulous
Pizarro with the moral authority on the Conquest, Bartolomé de Las Casas,
who by poetic license is part of the Spanish party and who openly accuses
Pizarro of immorality.
Pizarro in Peru was first performed at New York’s Park Theater in 1800
and remained part of the stock repertoire of American stages in the following years. Dunlap’s version of the play was based partly on Kotzebue’s original and to a larger degree on Richard Sheridan’s British adaptation that was
first performed very successfully in London in 1799. Both Sheridan’s and
Dunlap’s versions are considerably shorter than Kotzebue’s, an adaptation
to the Anglo-Saxon theatrical tradition that had to leave time for an “after
play” following the actual performance. Due to musical insertions between
scenes and a spectacular stage setting, Sheridan’s and Dunlap’s versions are
also much more operatic and depend to a larger degree on visual effects than
Kotzebue’s original (Strohschänk 1992, 116). As opposed to Barlow’s epic
rendering of the Incas, Dunlap’s play evokes an exotic spectacle of untamed
landscapes and noble savages rather than of a glorious national past. The
second scene of the second Act of Pizarro in Peru begins with the announcement of the “Temple of the Sun, with all the Magnificence of Peruvian
Superstition. In the centre an altar.” The famous second scene of the fifth
Act, in which Rolla saves Cora’s and Alonzo’s child from the Spaniards, is
announced as “The out-post of the Spanish camp—the back ground wild and
rocky, with a torrent falling down the precipice, over which a bridge is formed by
a felled tree” (von Kotzebue 1826, 174). The Incas appear praying to the sun,
living in pristine woods, and sacrificing themselves for moral goals. These
adaptations to American theatrical conventions were not least a concession
to an audience that wanted first to be entertained. Dunlap assessed the
stage’s possibilities in America realistically. As director of the New York Park
Theater between 1796 and 1805, he was faced both with financial problems
and with the need to produce new plays incessantly, one reason why he
adapted, apart from Die Spanier in Peru, a large number of other Kotzebue
plays for the American stage. However, Dunlap’s adaptation also displays
that the heroic and exotic Indian had become somewhat of a stock figure of
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the American popular imagination, one that was not necessarily linked to
the national imagined community any longer.
Dunlap’s version of Pizarro in Peru diverges from Kotzebue’s text in yet
another aspect. There are several passages in Kotzebue’s play that describe
the arrival of the Spaniards and the first contact with the Indians in ways
that invite parallels to the manner in which English settlers conquered the
Northern part of the continent. In Kotzebue’s text, Bartolomé de las Casas
accuses the Spaniards of bloodshed and cruelty, pointing out that the
natives had innocently welcomed the conquerors, whereupon the Spaniards
came upon them like devils.2 These sentences are omitted in the translation, as are parts of the talk between de las Casas, Pizarro, and the Spaniard
Valverde about the justification for colonizing the New World. Upon Las
Casas’ description of the atrocities of Spaniards against the Indians, Pizarro,
in Kotzebue’s original, retorts:
Pizarro: What you tell does not concern us. What do I care for the cruelties
of a Columbus, of an Ovando?
Las Casas: Are you not about to repeat them?
Valverde: And if so, as yet it is not decided if these Indians are men, or
apes.
Las Casas: Woe beget you! That the pope had to issue a bull for you to be
able to recognize humans.
Valverde: He gave us the New World to conquer, by grace of God.
(My translation from the German)3
The entire passage is missing from Dunlap’s play, which is not surprising if
we note that Pizarro here includes the venerated Columbus into the black
legend of Spanish cruelty. Moreover, the missing passage broaches the issue
of subjugation of the Indians—a subject that brought the Peruvian Indians
too close to home, where the violent displacement of the native population was in full progress. One might argue that Dunlap simply followed
Sheridan’s stage version, where these passages are also missing. Dunlap did,
however, make very conscious decisions about which version he adapted at
various points in the play. For example, he did retain Kotzebue’s original
ending, in which Pizarro stays alive and which corresponds to the historical
truth, whereas Sheridan changes Kotzebue’s plot to have the play end with
Pizarro’s death. It can therefore be assumed that Dunlap intentionally followed Sheridan in the omission of the passages discussing the Conquest.
Whereas Freneau in “The Rising Glory of America” had made a clear distinction between Incas and Aztecs as opposed to the native populations in North
America, thus justifying westward expansion, Dunlap apparently thought it
safer to leave out the topic of white colonization entirely. The conquest of
American Indians was difficult to harmonize with the republican rhetoric of
virtue, liberty, and morality that dominated his play.
Twenty-six years after Dunlap’s glorification of Peruvian heroism and
his romantic and exoticizing construction of its native population, the view
across the southern U.S. border rendered a different image of Latin America
in literature. In this period, the young republic had begun to expand toward
the West and toward the South. The Louisiana Purchase had added a huge
territory to the United States, and travelers exploring these new regions also
started to portray areas beyond the nation’s borders. Mexico, in particular,
became a concrete object of expansionist desires. Although the border
between the provinces acquired through the Louisiana Purchase and the
then Spanish colony of Mexico had been stipulated in the Adams-Onís
Treaty of 1819, in the subsequent decades until the U.S.-Mexican War, the
United States made several attempts to buy parts of Mexico. While nationalist discourses increasingly drew on U.S. American history, nature, and
culture to establish a national identity, rendering pre-Columbian societies
less necessary and less attractive as parts of this tradition, expansionist
frontier rhetoric depended on a narrativization of the border as the parting
line between savagery and civilization. Donald Pease has pointed to the link
between the coherence-creating myths of a nation that constructed itself as
“nature’s nation”—of a national subject (American Adam) in a representative national landscape (Virgin Land), endowed with an exemplary national
motif (Errand into the Wilderness)—and the exclusionist mechanisms
toward populations that were seen as not belonging to the national community. As he argues, the American national narrative developed through
and depended on the exclusions of subjected peoples (“women, blacks,
‘foreigners,’ the homeless”).4 In this process, the representation of Mexico
and Mexicans increasingly followed a binary pattern within which they
emerged as figures of otherness. At the same time, as expansionist projects
became more concrete, Mexico, in the fiction of the period, became a site
of imperial desire.
Timothy Flint’s Francis Berrian: Or, The Mexican Patriot (Boston 1826),
the first North American novel set in Mexico, can be seen as the first fictional text to start this representational tradition. Flint, one of the most
popular writers of the 1820s, never traveled to Mexico himself; he was a
pastor of a Congregational church in Massachusetts, and later did missionary work in the Midwest, specifically Missouri, Arkansas, and Louisiana,
before he started a writing career. Francis Berrian was his most popular
text, being republished twice in 1834, in Philadelphia and London. The
novel is dedicated to Henry Bullard, a former fellow student of Flint at
Harvard, who had spent several years in Mexico and who provided Flint
with the descriptive details about the country.
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The plot of Francis Berrian is interesting for its rendering of AngloAmericans and Mexicans at a time when the representational patterns for
these groups had not yet stabilized in the ways they did in the 1830s and
1840s. The hero of the novel, Francis Berrian—an ideal American who
is good-looking, brave, enterprising, and enlightened—rescues Martha,
a woman of the Mexican nobility, first from an Indian captor, later from
her unloved Mexican fiancé, and, most importantly of all, from cultural
illiteracy by teaching her his language, Western philosophy, and the ideals of Republicanism.5 Moreover, in truly republican fashion, he helps
liberate Mexico from the yoke of Spanish colonialism and later from the
tyrannous ruler Iturbide. The novel was written in a period when the ideal
of Republican manhood—the ideal of the virtuous, self-reliant, educated
American male—was celebrated in many fictional texts. As Dana Nelson
has pointed out, the image of selfhood and citizenship in the early nation
was largely based on the concept of Republican manliness. Qualities such
as self-control, discipline, the striving for self-improvement, independence, and fortitude were regarded essential in a Republican male. At
the same time, as Nelson makes clear, the idea of civilized white national
manhood was based on the white American man’s difference from others
within (and, one may add, without) the republic—women, nonwhites,
poor immigrants, criminals, etc., who were constructed as lacking essential
elements of this republican ideal (1998, 13, 18).
In Francis Berrian, Republican manhood is linked to the national
expansionist venture. Significantly, in this text, Mexico is “won” for the
republican project by a love plot that links the protagonist to a “Spanish”
woman. As the novel proceeds, Martha is educated by Berrian into a model
Republican who in the end renounces “wealth and hereditary honors” to
become the wife of “a simple citizen of the United States” (Flint 1826,
331). Martha’s marriage to Francis Berrian signals the beginning of a
discursive tradition that presents Mexico as backward, uncivilized, and
in need of Anglo-American “guidance” while at the same time exploring
the possibilities of acquisition by peaceful means, that is, by marriage
(Streeby 2002). Clearly, Martha assimilates into Francis Berrian’s culture
and not vice versa. That Republicanism is linked to the more stalwart
pecuniary interests of Americans in Mexico becomes evident in the novel
when, at the beginning of the second volume, Berrian describes a party of
Americans who, like him, want to help in the liberation of Mexico from
colonial oppression. They are described as
[m]any gallant and high-minded men, to whom no career was open in the
United States, who disdained oppression, and under that generous feeling,
probably concealed from themselves dawning ambition, and a cupidity
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fired with the prospect of the Mexican mines, united west of the Sabine.
Their avowed object was to aid the Patriot natives in communicating to this
oppressed and beautiful country, the entire freedom of their own.
While Martha becomes an eager supporter of Republicanism, Berrian
has increasing doubts about the possibility of winning Mexico for the
Republican cause. Early in the novel, the protagonist describes his experiences at the frontier as a journey back in history:
I had occasion to experiment the truth of the remark, that in traveling
toward the frontier, the decreasing scale of civilization and improvement
exhibits an accurate illustration of inverted history. Improvements decrease
in the order of distance, as they have increased in the order of time. We traveled down six centuries in as many days. First, we lost sight of handsome
and commodious houses, residences of builders, who often saw good models. We gradually lost sight of the mansions of the opulent cotton-planters,
who are noted for their hospitality. We lost sight of men dressed in articles
of imported fabric. Then we traversed the belt of vachers and shepherds,
with their blanket-capotes and their comfortable, but rustic log establishments. Then we traversed the region of the half savage white inhabitants,
the intermediate race between savage and civilized man. On the Kiamesia
we passed the American garrison, and saw the cheering sight of the spiritstirring stars and stripes, waving above the rude fortress and the comfortable quarters, three hundred leagues from the compact population of the
country. We joined to admire the genius of a country yet so young, and that
has thus early learned to stretch her maternal arms to these remote deserts,
in token of efficient protection to the frontier people from the terrors of the
ruthless savages.
(Flint 1826, 39–40)
As the passage demonstrates, Mexico is regarded as being on an inferior
civilizational stage. The American garrison provides the only sign of civilization with its “comfortable quarters.” Moreover, the notion of the United
States stretching “her maternal arms to these remote deserts” casts the garrison as a sign of protection rather than of U.S. expansionism. Just as Berrian
brings enlightenment and education to the benighted Mexicans, the garrison functions as a symbol of U.S. civilizational superiority. Significantly,
Flint also has Berrian encounter strong resistance to his republican ideals
from the patriarchal elite of the country, embodied in Martha’s father
(a Spanish count), the Catholic priest, and Martha’s fiancé. These men,
who stubbornly persist in defending the colonial status of Mexico, are
strongly opposed to the idea of liberation. In addition, the savage state of
(Flint 1826, 5)
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The people in this country are so wild, ignorant, and uneducated, and at
the present moment we are surrounded by so many enemies, visible and
invisible, so many dangers of every sort, rebellion, treason, discord, the savages, that you can hardly conjecture how my confidence goes out toward a
young man, educated, principled, high-minded, and, to use Bryan’s expression, ‘as true as steel.’ Indeed, we hope you will go with us.
(Flint 1826, 135)
Francis Berrian sets the stage for texts about “Spanish America” that no
longer circle around the past, but focus on contemporary Americans who
explore territories beyond the nation’s shifting borders. The dime novel
conventions already visible in this text would find their full expression in
the period after the U.S.-Mexican War when “Spanish women” and international romance become much more present in American popular literature. But already in this early novel about Mexico, the romance between
an elite “Spanish” woman and an Anglo-American suggests what Shelley
Streeby has called “a benign form of imperial conquest”—a way “to conquer Mexico by whitening it through transnational heterosexual unions”
(Streeby 2002, 115; see Robinson 1977; de León 1983).
Latin America, both in the early years of the Republic as well as in its
later, more openly expansionist phase, thus provided a site that encouraged imaginary scenarios of interest for the United States—either as a
storehouse of past glories or as a promising El Dorado of future riches.
In contrast, the Caribbean remained, with few exceptions, a discursive
lacuna in early national identity discourses. An important reason for this
is that the Caribbean, from the beginning, was embedded in a different set
of discourses than Latin America—discourses that were difficult to harmonize with the narrative of national glory. One of these discourses was
slavery. The West Indies was the first region where slavery was perfected
into an important economic factor, at a time when the slave industry
began to flourish in the emerging American nation as well. As a result,
the Caribbean constantly reminded the advocators of American political nationalism of the racial and social hierarchies at home, hierarchies
that collided with the republican claim to equality and liberty. Another
discourse privileged the Caribbean’s reputation as the origin of social and
racial unrest. As many historians have pointed out, the West Indies in the
eighteenth and early nineteenth century were considered the source of
the violent revolts that threatened the order of the slave holding colonies
and the early republic (Linebaugh and Rediker 2000; Hunt 1988; Trouillot
the majority of Mexicans (as contrasted with the civilized Americans) is a
constant theme in the novel. As Martha’s mother proclaims:
1995). Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker speak of a “cycle of rebellion”
that shook the West Indies in the 1730s to the 1760s (193). These rebellions
were often described in terms of epidemic diseases spreading across the
country through imported slaves. Moreover, the Caribbean was associated
with the pejorative association “Creole”: there were traditional European
assumptions that people living in the Caribbean “tropics” with its mixings
of cultures, languages, peoples, and races led to a “degeneracy” from the
European “norm.” While the Caribbean was thus avoided by many writers of the early national period, it became a site of empowerment for one
group in the young nation that was disenfranchised from citizen’s rights—
African Americans, particularly after the Haitian Revolution that toppled
the French colonial regime and abolished slavery on St. Domingue.
African Americans, as many other groups, had regarded the American
Revolution as a moment of promise (Sale 1997, 11). The egalitarian potential of the Revolution appealed to them as it proclaimed, in the Declaration
of Independence, that “all men are created equal.” In the beginning, this
promise seemed to come true at least for some black men. The spirit of
the Revolution, coupled with black military service during the Revolution,
inspired a wave of manumission laws that freed several thousand blacks.
However, the position of the black population within the new nation was
a contested issue. Slavery collided with democratic ideals, and free African
Americans were an equally uncomfortable presence because they jeopardized the racial hierarchies based on the “natural” superiority of whites. In
many Republican texts about liberty, justice, and equality, blacks remained
invisible. When they did become part of public utterances, they were framed
as essentially different “others” who did not belong to the national collective. As African Americans looked beyond the nation’s borders, they found
the promise of liberty realized in revolutionary movements elsewhere—in
the Haitian Revolution on St. Domingue that started in 1791, as well as
in the emancipation of slaves in the former Spanish colonies that became
independent in the 1820s.
Early activist African American texts used Haiti and the Latin American
republics to comment on the oppression of blacks in the United States
from a hemispheric perspective and to construct an empowering transnational historical narrative for black people. One key medium for the
distribution of black thought in this early period was Freedom’s Journal,
the first black newspaper published in the United States, which was coedited by John Russwurm and Samuel Cornish. As I will point out, early
African American activist texts in this newspaper employed events in the
Caribbean and Latin America in their revisionist endeavors to question
stereotypical constructions of blackness from a transnational viewpoint,
rewriting these regions into sites of empowerment.
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Freedom’s Journal appeared on a regular weekly basis between March
16, 1827, and March 28, 1829. It provided international, national, and
regional information on current events and contained editorials declaiming slavery, lynching, and other injustices. In the brief two-year period
of its existence, the journal published an extensive number of articles on
Haiti, most of them celebrating the Haitian Revolution as empowering for
African Americans. It also frequently referred to the newly founded Latin
American states. In the newspaper’s inaugural editorial, Russwurm and
Cornish positioned African American activism within a trans-American,
hemispheric framework. They pointed out that their efforts to speak for
black people and to forward their cause were inspired by “the establishment of the Republic of Hayti” as well as by “the advancement of liberal
ideas in South America, where despotism has given place to free governments, and where many of our brethren now fill important civil and military stations” (Russwurm and Cornish 1827, 1). They refer, of course, to
Latin American independence movements that were accompanied by the
abolition of slavery or by declarations of intention to do so. Many of these
republics also announced—at least in terms of the law—the abolishment
of the racial caste system, making them a point of reference and of comparison for free blacks in the United States.
References to the West Indies and to Latin America continue to emerge
in the subsequent issues. On April 20, 1827, an undisclosed New York
author informs the readers under the headline “The Revolt in Texas” about
the Fredonian Rebellion: in December of 1826, Anglo-American settlers
in the Mexican province of Texas founded the Republic of Fredonia in an
attempt to declare independence from Mexico. The author of the article
links the revolt to a new Mexican law that prohibited the importation
of slaves into Texas after the country’s independence from Spain. The
incident is used by the author to remind readers of the promise of liberty
contained in the Declaration of Independence and the clash between this
promise and the reality in the United States:
The truth is, the new Republics of North and South America have set us an
example on the subject of slavery, which we should do well to imitate, under
such modifications as our peculiar circumstances render necessary. If we
remember right, the last slave in Colombia is to be emancipated within the
present year. Peru has essentially lightened the burdens that for centuries has
oppressed the poor Indians; and Mexico evinces, by her decision in enforcing the law in behalf of enslaved Africans, that she is determined not to be
behind her sister Republics in this cause of justice, humanity and religion.
Meanwhile the United States, where the torch of liberty was first
kindled—the United States, who claim to be the freest and happiest people
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on the face of the earth, are cherishing in their bosom nearly 3,000,000 of
wretched slaves, and as a nation, are doing nothing to mitigate the evil!
Repeatedly the situation in the West Indies and in Latin America is linked
to slavery in the United States. “[W]hat will be the case, when the slaves
in the West Indies and the Spanish states, become all free citizens?” asks
the author of an article of the Christian Spectator, reprinted in Freedom’s
Journal on April 6, 1827. The author, of course, points to the fact that the
liberation of slaves in Latin America, Haiti, and (potentially) in other parts
of the West Indies did not pass unnoticed with free and enslaved blacks in
the United States. In a similar vein, and in a later issue, the same author—
whose name is given as “S.F.D.”—warns slave holders that “to go on in the
present course is certain ruin to the whole,” continuing:
I appeal then to Sierra Leone, to Hayti, to Colombia, and say that slaves have
been liberated, in so great numbers as to form the mass of the population,
particularly in Hayti, and that the difficulties and dangers of the process
have always arisen, not from the turbulence and disorder of the liberated
slaves, but from the vexatious, unreasonable conduct of their masters, struggling to retain or recover their power to oppress.
(Anon. 1827c)
Moreover, on June 10, in a text reprinted from the Alexandria Gazette, the
issue of Florida’s statehood is raised as a question essentially concerning
slaves. If Florida is included in the Union as a slave state, the article author
warns, then its proximity to Cuba might instigate violent revolts there.
The unsettled state of Cuba will make it highly possible that the island
will soon “fall into other hands”—possibly into those of Great Britain or
the South American Republics. In either case, slavery would be abolished
there, and then “nothing less than a large standing army will keep the
slaves [in Florida] in subjection” (Anon. 1827d).
The menace of uprising slaves is also a key issue in a series of articles about Haiti written by a pseudonymous author who calls himself
“Africanus.” The essays by “Africanus” celebrate Haiti as a source of empowerment for black people and clearly announce what will happen to those
who continue to tolerate slavery. In “Hayti, No. II: From the Scrapbook
of Africanus” (Freedom’s Journal April 27, 1827), the author works with
images of natural violence to indicate that the liberation process cannot
be stopped and issues a warning against those who continue to side with
slaveholders: “We may delay the evils of insurrections and revolutions; but
(Anon. 1827b)
111
like the eruptions of Vesuvius, they will burst forth more awfully amid the
horrors of midnight and wo [sic] to every hand within the reach of its
lava, wherever Slavery is tolerated!” (Africanus 1827a, 2). Using the image
of the volcano, which was conventionally associated with the unpredictability and force of nature and humans in the tropics, the pseudonymous
text by “Africanus” puts a notable emphasis on the consequences of the
revolutionary process in Haiti for the supporters of slavery. In an article
published on October 12, 1827, “Africanus” combines his representation of
Haiti as an example of the pride and the capabilities of people of African
descent with an explicit warning against their tormentors in the United
States and elsewhere:
[T]he republic of Hayti exhibits a spectacle hitherto unseen in these modern
and degenerate days: it is now demonstrated that the descendants of Africa
are capable of self-government: the plea so often urged by the adherents of
slavery, “the poor creatures, should we free them, will starve to death,” will
now be but sounding brass in the opinion of every reasonable man. I trust
also that the lesson inculcated by the Haytiens will be a warning where man
is held in bondage and degradation by his fellow—whenever he is denied
the unalienable rights of nature. It will teach petty despots, that in oppression the chain has a certain length which should they undertake to stretch,
may snap—and bring death to the oppressor, and liberty to the captive.
(Africanus 1827c, 123)
In the texts of early African American activism, Haiti functions as a
device by which African Americans could make a strong argument for
black agency and self-esteem. The support of the Haitian Revolution
in Freedom’s Journal also included a revised image of its famed leader,
Toussaint L’Ouverture. Whereas textual representations of Toussaint in
other print materials often depicted him as a sanguinary and sadistic creature, in early black activist texts he emerges as a hero, posited as an example for the intellectual and spiritual capabilities of blacks. The May 4, 1827,
issue of Freedom’s Journal contains an article on Toussaint L’Ouverture
in which the black revolutionary leader is presented as an example for
the “splendor of native and original greatnesse” (Africanus 1827b, 30) of
the black people of St. Domingue. L’Ouverture is called “one of the most
extraordinary men of his age” and a “Spartacus.” The article writer takes
pains to construct him as a character “marked by sedateness and patience
of temper” (Africanus 1827b, 30) and as a model of discipline, thus rejecting the image of Toussaint L’Ouverture as a bloodthirsty and violent black
rebel. Through this image of L’Ouverture, the article creates the leader of
the Haitian Revolution as a hero of the black community who gives proof
of the dignity and heroism as well as of the intellectual capabilities of black
people. Using the black leader as a model of virtue, the author counters
the suggestion of blacks as creatures lacking humanity and intellect. “The
transactions in that Island,” he suggests, “have presented the most incontestible [sic] proofs, that the negro is not, in general, wanting in the higher
qualifications of the mind” (Africanus 1827b, 30). L’Ouverture, called by
some of his black contemporaries “the Washington of St. Domingue,”
stood as a model of black manhood and self-determination for African
Americans (Kachun 2006, 252).
The late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century writers discussed in
this essay employ Latin America and the Caribbean for various purposes,
revealing the importance of non-European points of reference in the
construction of identities in the early national period. At the same time,
the different uses these writers make of extranational territories also gives
evidence of the instability and vagueness of early national identity concepts between the late eighteenth and the early nineteenth century and of
their heterogeneity. While Republicanism was an omnipresent idea in this
period, it was less a coherent political and philosophical concept than a
flexible cultural signifier that was interpreted in different ways by writers,
depending on their respective situations and on the concrete contexts of
their writing. Freneau and Barlow—authors who represented the white
literary elite of the young nation—strove to create an historical epic of
foundational proportions. William Dunlap, in an attempt to both secure
his theater’s survival and enhance his patriotic visions of national character, uses Kotzebue’s play to provide a romantic spectacle of pre-Conquest
Peruvians as both innocent and virtuous children of nature. As the
American imperial project takes shape at the beginning of the nineteenth
century, Latin America and particularly Mexico are increasingly framed as
sites of expansionist desires. Flint’s Francis Berrian can be seen as a conquest narrative that reveals how Anglo-Americans no longer mine the territories south of the national border for foundational myths but consider
them exploratory territories for more material riches. Disenfranchised
groups within the new nation, such as African Americans, looked beyond
the border toward the Caribbean and Latin America for the liberating
potential of political revolts such as the Haitian Revolution and the Latin
American independence movements. Their concrete point of reference
was the status of blacks in these countries. In Freedom’s Journal, both Haiti
and the Latin American republics became symbols of liberty and progress
at a time when these regions, in dominant nationalist narratives, were
framed as sites of corruption and backwardness. The study of these and
other early hemispheric writings reveals that transnational perspectives
are by no means a phenomenon linked to the modern and postmodern
112
113
era, but have accompanied the construction of American identities from
its beginnings.
1. The 1771 version of the poem differs slightly from the second version. For a
closer inspection of the differences, see Wertheimer 1999, 17–52.
2. “Ist das Blutmaaß eurer Grausamkeiten noch nicht voll? Diese Kinder frommer
Unschuld, die euch gastfrei aufnahmen, wann haben sie genug gelitten? . . . Als
Götter wurdet ihr empfangen, als Teufel kamt ihr unter sie!” (von Kotzebue
1826, 20).
3. “Pizarro: Was du erzählst, trifft nicht uns. Was kümmern mich die Grausamkeiten
eines Columbus, eines Ovando? / Las Casas: Steht Ihr nicht im Begriff, sie zu
erneuern? / Valverde: Und wäre es auch, noch ist es kaum entschieden, ob diese
Indianer Menschen, oder Affen sind. / Las Casas: Wehe Euch! Daß der Vater
Pabst erst eine Bulle geben musste, um euch Menschen kennen zu lehren. /
Valverde: Er hat uns die neue Welt geschenkt, um sie zu unterjochen, mit Hülfe
der göttlichen Gnade” (von Kotzebue 1826, 22).
4. “When understood from within the context of the construction of an imagined
national community, the negative class, race, and gender categories of these
subject peoples were not a historical aberration but a structural necessity for
the construction of a national narrative whose coherence depended upon the
internal opposition between Nature’s Nation and peoples understood to be
constructed of a ‘different nature’” (Pease 1994, 4).
5. Republicanism was the distinctive political consciousness of the entire
Revolutionary generation. It was based on a set of principles that included civic
virtue, honor, freedom, sovereignty, inalienable rights, and liberalism. American
republicanism was based on English models as well as Roman and European
ideas.
References
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libraryarchives/aanp/freedom/index.asp.
———. 1827b. Freedom’s Journal, April 20.http://www.wisconsinhistory.org/
———. 1827c. Freedom’s Journal, April 27.http://www.wisconsinhistory.org/
———. 1827d. On the Political Tendency of Slavery in the United States. Freedom’s
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index.asp.
Africanus. 1827a. Hayti, No. II: From the Scrap-Book of Africanus. Freedom’s Journal,
April 27. http://www.wisconsinhistory.org/libraryarchives/aanp/freedom/index.asp.
———. 1827b. Hayti, No. III: From the Scrap-Book of Africanus. Freedom’s Journal,
May 4. http://www.wisconsinhistory.org/libraryarchives/aanp/freedom/index.asp.
Notes
———. 1827c. Hayti, No. VI: From the Scrap-Book of Africanus. Freedom’s Journal,
October 12. http://www.wisconsinhistory.org/libraryarchives/aanp/freedom/index.
asp.
Barlow, Joel. 1787/1992. The Vision of Columbus, ed. Fredo Arias. Mexico: Frente
de Afirmación Hispanista, A.C.
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in Post-Revolutionary American Literature. PhD. Diss. Providence: Brown
University.
Dunlap, William. 1800. Pizarro in Peru; or, The Death of Rolla. A Play, in Five Acts.
From the German of Augustus Von Kotzebue. With Notes Marking the Variations
from the Original. New York: G. F. Hopkins.
Elliott, Emory. 2007. Diversity in the United States and Abroad: What Does It Mean
When American Studies Is Transnational? American Quarterly 59.1: 1–22.
Fisher-Fishkin, Shelley. 2005. Crossroads of Cultures: The Transnational Turn in
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Freneau, Philip. 1786. The Poems of Philip Freneau. Written Chiefly During the Late
War. Philadelphia. Early American Imprints. Series I: Evans, 1639–1800.
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and Culture in the New Republic. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
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Latino Writing. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Hunt, Alfred. 1988. Haiti’s Influence on Antebellum America: Slumbering Volcano in
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Kachun, Mitch. 2006. Antebellum African Americans, Public Commemoration,
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Slaves, Commoners and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic. Boston:
Beacon Press.
Nelson, Dana. 1998. National Manhood: Capitalist Citizenship and the Imagined
Fraternity of White Men. Durham: Duke University Press.
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Pease, Donald. 1994. National Identities, Postmodern Artifacts, and Postnational
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Slammin’ in Transnational
Heterotopia: Words Being
Spoken at the Nuyorican
Poets Cafe
Harald Zapf
Pourtant je crois qu’il y a—et ceci dans toute société—des utopies
qui ont un lieu précis et réel, un lieu qu’on peut situer sur une carte;
des utopies qui ont un temps déterminé, un temps qu’on peut fixer et
mesurer selon le calendrier de tous les jours.
(Michel Foucault, “Les Hétérotopies”)
I
n this chapter I will focus on the Nuyorican Poets Cafe and zoom in
on two poetry anthologies of writers associated with it. Both collections were coedited by Miguel Algarín, a Nuyorriqueño, who is one of the
founders of the Poets Cafe. In 1975, he and cofounder Miguel Piñero, also
known as the “Philosopher of the Criminal Mind” (Algarín 1994, 507),
published the collection Nuyorican Poetry: An Anthology of Puerto Rican
Words and Feelings. Almost twenty years later, in 1994, Algarín teamed up
with the Anglo-American poetry slam host Bob Holman; together they
brought out the American Book Award−winning anthology Aloud: Voices
from the Nuyorican Poets Cafe.
The publication dates of these two anthologies mark a period in
American cultural history when the importance of ethnic nationalism
in poetry had begun to wane and when transethnic performance poetry
already was at its peak. In 1975, the most influential cultural nationalist poet, the African American writer Amiri Baraka, a close ally of the
7
HARALD ZAPF
Nuyorican Poets Cafe, had just distanced himself from his nationalist
attitude and entered his transnational Third World Marxist Period. The
year 1994 saw the Nuyorican Poets Cafe’s slam heyday with Bob Holman:
from the Cafe’s first poetry slam on November 3, 1989, until the triumph
of Saul Williams as Grand Slam Champion in 1996, Holman was “volunteer Slam Host” from 10:00 p.m. to 4:00 a.m. on Fridays (Stratton 1998,
134, 131). During these seven years, when “the total number of poetry
readings” in the United States—especially the “percentage of nonacademic
readings”—increased dramatically, the Nuyorican Poets Cafe was most
instrumental in popularizing poetry (Stratton 1998, 134). In his “Slam
Diaries” Bob Holman says, with a certain amount of self-praise and a sense
of countercultural, noncommercial self-importance, that the reopening
of the Nuyorican Poets Cafe in 1989 was “a more potent benchmark” for
the “rise in poetry’s status” than MTV’s Spoken Word: Unplugged shows
in 1992 and 1994 (Stratton 1998, 136). If we look back at the Nuyorican
Poets Cafe from 1975 to 1994, we can see, on the one hand, a place of ethnic awareness, with certain remnants of a necessary but somewhat belated
(Latino) cultural nationalism, and, on the other hand, a venue with an
orientation—right from the beginning—toward oral poetry, which makes
it a forerunner, in 1975, and a protagonist, in 1994, of what is now called
spoken-word and performance poetry. In inter-American and transnational verse culture, ethnicity, and performance are inextricably linked
with the Nuyorican.
“Nuyorican” is a hybrid word, a mixture of “New York” and “Puerto
Rican,” that signifies an inter-American “New World Border” (Guillermo
Gómez-Peña).1 According to Ilan Stavans’ 2003 dictionary of Spanglish,
“Nuyorican” refers to a “Puerto Rican person in the mainland” (181).
Compared to the different shades of meaning given to the term by Miguel
Algarín in his introductions to the two anthologies, this definition sounds
rather neutral and imprecise. In 1975, Algarín followed a more politicized,
typical minority discourse-strategy: he used “Nuyorican,” which had originally been a negative term, in a positive and affirmative way. Village Voice
contributor Ed Morales writes that, according to Algarín, the term “was
coined by islanders as a way of distancing themselves from what they considered to be inferior versions of Puerto Rican-ness. Nuyoricans speak too
much English, have forgotten the great cultural heroes of the island, and . . .
are uninvolved in its politics” (Morales 2002, 212). Algarín’s 1975 introduction to the first anthology was oriented around class-consciousness,
ethnocentricity, the Puerto Rican community in New York and—like much
of today’s so-called underground rap music—around local authenticity
and street credibility: “Nuyorican” was supposed to refer to “the experience
of Puerto Ricans on the streets of New York” (Algarín and Piñero 1975,
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119
15). The term also had an overt socioeconomic meaning, which implicitly
questioned the American capitalist system and accused the middle- and
upper-class strata of American society of internal colonization: “The
Nuyorican is a slave class that trades hours for dollars at the lowest rung
of the earning scale” (Algarín and Piñero 1975, 15). In Marxist terms we
can say that Algarín’s 1994 definition of “Nuyorican” is less concerned with
the economic base of society; it is less overtly political, more inclusive and
culture-oriented. In his introduction to Aloud, Algarín gives a definition
in four parts. The first two are still very much in tune with the traditional
meaning of “Nuyorican”; part three and four, however, clearly transgress
the older semantic bounds of the term. Part one and two evoke the 1960s
and 70s, the era of different ethnic movements; these two parts of the definition are concerned with constituting a distinctive identity of “la raza” and
therefore stress origins, language, aesthetics, and appearance. Part one of
the definition of “Nuyorican” is: “Originally Puerto Rican epithet for those
of Puerto Rican heritage born in New York: their Spanish was different
(Spanglish), their way of dress and look were different. They were a stateless people (like most U.S. poets) until the Cafe became their homeland”
(Algarín and Holman 1994, 5); and part two reads: “After Algarín and
Piñero, a proud poet speaking New York Puerto Rican” (5). The end of part
one, Algarín’s statement “They were a stateless people . . . until the Cafe
became their homeland,” invites us to consider the Cafe a transnational heterotopia and/or to associate Nuyoricans with Chicanos and their homeland
Aztlán, with the Jewish diaspora and Israel, or with postcolonial diasporas
and migrants in general. The comparison “like most U.S. poets” in part one
already hints at the transethnic expansion of the term “Nuyorican” in part
three of the definition. Here, in part three, “Nuyorican” refers to “a denizen
of the Nuyorican Poets Cafe” (5). So any person that is found in this particular place, anybody who “inhabits,” “resides in,” or simply frequents the
Nuyorican Poets Cafe, is called “Nuyorican,” without ethnic qualifications.
Presence is the criterion, not descent: “It ain’t where you from, it’s where
you at.”2 Part four of Algarín’s definition—“New York’s riches”—takes us
back to the economic base of the term, but with an ironic twist (5). By
identifying “Nuyorican” with “abundant wealth,” with “large amounts of
money,” or with “beautiful,” “valuable”, or “precious possessions,” Algarín
gives the term a hybrid, a double-voiced meaning in Bakhtin’s sense,
because it combines two or more perspectives and worldviews (Bakhtin
1981, 429): one of the possible readings is that if you are economically poor
you can still be culturally rich. No matter how we interpret this short part
of the definition, we see the common ethnic minority strategy that I already
mentioned above: a term that originally had negative connotations is now
used in a positive way.
SLAMMIN’ IN TRANSNATIONAL HETEROTOPIA
HARALD ZAPF
Another term with positive connotations of ethnic consciousness and
self-confidence is “Loisaida,” a Nuyorican Spanglish word that refers to
Loiza, “a town in Puerto Rico that is widely acknowledged as the heart
of African culture on the island” (Morales 2002, 101), and especially to
Manhattan’s Lower East Side, which became a Puerto Rican ghetto in the
1950s. “Loisaida” supposedly is “a creation of Bimbo Rivas” (Algarín and
Holman 1994, 26). In Aloud’s “Notes on the Poets,” Rivas, who died in
1992, is presented as the one who “laid down the laws of Nuyorican aesthetics for Theater and Poetry” (Algarín and Holman 1994, 507). Among
his works are a Loisaida-mural on Avenue C between 5th and 6th street
and an apostrophic lyric poem titled “Loisaida.” If we follow Jonathan
Culler’s definition of apostrophe and lyric poetry, we start out from the
idea “that lyrics, unlike novels, are also spoken by the reader” and assume
that apostrophe “produces a fictive, discursive event” instead of representing an event (2002, xv, 153). So when we read a lyric like Rivas’ “Loisaida,”
“aloud or silently, we utter the words, we temporarily occupy the position”
of the bilingual speaker (xv), so that we, too, engage in the “act of addressing” Loisaida; in the “apostrophic now” we express the following (xv, 153):
“Loisaida, I love you!” (Algarín and Holman 1994, 361).
As we also see in Rivas’ poem, when he talks about “una gente . . . de
todas rasas” (361), the Lower East Side is not, and has never been, a purely
Puerto Rican neighborhood; Algarín calls it “the eternally transitional
neighborhood” (Algarín and Holman 1994, 26). The Lower East Side has
always been a transnational, multiracial, multiethnic, multicultural, and
multilingual area; after the Second World War, Loisaida also became a
truly inter-American zone.3 Here, in a section known as “Alphabet City,”
the Nuyorican Poets Cafe is located.
On the Nuyorican Poets Cafe homepage, in the “about us” section, we
are told that the Cafe was founded circa 1973 and that it “began as a living room salon in the East Village apartment” of Miguel Algarín. By 1974
or 1975 it obviously “became clear that there were many poets and too
much energy for Algarín’s living room.” In Leon Ichaso’s 2001 film Piñero,
a biopic about the fast life of the now defunct Miguel Piñero, we get the
same impression: Algarín founded the Cafe because he wanted to get all
those poets out of his living room. This might not be the gospel truth,
but regardless, after deconstruction we know that every origin is only a
trace. The living room story is as good as any other mythical narrative of
origins and it probably serves its purpose well, because it fosters the idea
of Nuyorican poetry as a homemade cultural product coming directly
from the people, from the border between art and life. The story supports
Joseph Beuys’ egalitarian avant-garde dictum “Every man is an artist.” In
1974 or 1975, we learn from the Cafe’s homepage, Algarín rented a little
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Irish bar, the Sunshine Cafe on East 6th Street between Avenue A and
B, which was christened “The Nuyorican Poets Café.” In 1980, it moved
to a building at 236 East 3rd Street, between Avenues B and C, “in the
heart of Midtown Loisaida” (Algarín and Holman 1994, 2), and closed
in 1982. It opened up again in 1989. The moment that led to this event is
related to us by Algarín in the first part of his introduction to the Aloud
anthology, a pathos-ridden account covering the time from the last days
of Miguel “Miky” Piñero to his wake in 1988. According to Algarín, it was
Bob Holman who took the initiative to reopen the Cafe; Holman says, he
“had been traveling around, getting into the rap-is-poetry modality” and
“wanted to start a club” (Kane 2003, 206). Algarín writes that Holman
approached him at Piñero’s wake saying, “‘Miguel, it’s time to reopen the
Cafe. This is the moment, you know, and Miky is insisting on it, and we
are ready. Let’s move on it, let’s open the Nuyorican Poets Cafe again’”
(Algarín and Holman 1994, 8). After reopening the Cafe in 1989, Holman
and Algarín worked together till 1996, when Holman left, apparently after
a bad quarrel with Algarín. In his book Poetic Culture, Christopher Beach
follows a Village Voice article from October 7, 1997, entitled “Grand Slam:
The Last Word at the Nuyorican” by Ed Morales, and attributes
the split to a clash between Algarín’s desire to preserve the Latino roots of
the cafe and Holman’s desire to bring the Nuyorican to a wider and more
multicultural audience. Holman’s slogan—“We are all Nuyoricans”—does
not seem to have convinced some members of the Latino community, supposedly including Algarín, who may feel that the original idea of the cafe
has been co-opted by Holman and a slicker, more MTV-oriented group
of poets.
(Beach 1999, 216)
If all that is true, Algarín’s personal opinion is contrary to parts of his public and published depiction of the Cafe and its goals. In Algarín’s definition
of “Nuyorican,” which I quoted and analyzed above, we can see that the
slogan “We are all Nuyoricans” was not only spread by Holman but also
by Algarín himself. And when we visit the Nuyorican website today, which
lists Algarín first among the “Board of Directors” as “Founding President”
without even mentioning Holman’s name, we get the paradoxical impression that Holman withdrew although he had won the battle. In the “about
us” section of the webpage we do not find any statement stressing the
importance of preserving Puerto Rican Latino roots; instead we read: “The
mission of the Cafe is to create a multi-cultural venue that both nurtures
artists and exhibits a variety of artistic works. Without limitation, we
are dedicated to providing a stage for the arts with access for the widest
HARALD ZAPF
public.” In 1999, in his book Poetic Culture, Christopher Beach wrote that
any given night at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe “might bring out aspiring
teenage poets, students from New York University, and Beat-generation
bards; the audience will include middle-class whites from Queens and
Bensonhurst, Latinos from the Lower East Side, blacks from uptown, and
visitors who have come to this mecca of slam poetry from Chicago, Los
Angeles, Boston, or Dublin” (119). Judging from the Cafe’s dense, almost
daily program and broad range of activities in the present, we can assume
that it still succeeds in attracting a socially and ethnically diverse crowd.
Today, the nonprofit organization “Nuyorican Poets Cafe” mainly is a
forum for the performing arts, for music, film and video, comedy and
theater, poetry and prose readings, slam and performance poetry, and
Hip Hop.
It is not surprising that Hip Hop is one of the most integrative program
sections of the Nuyorican Poets Cafe, because Hip Hop, an immensely
hybridized and multilingual art form,4 is the most important cultural
matrix for many performing artists today, especially for young slam
and performance poets. Even if some of them, like Paul Beatty or Saul
Williams, refuse to be called “Rap Poets,” they grew up with Hip Hop culture and were influenced more by rap than by conventional written poetry.
In his “invocation” to the Aloud anthology, Bob Holman also stresses the
rap-connection:
RAP IS POETRY—and its spoken essence is central to the popularization
of poetry. Rap is taking its place, aloud, as a new poetic form, with ancient
griot roots. Hip hop is a cultural throughline for the Oral Tradition. Word
goes public! Poetry has found a way to drill through the wax that had been
collecting for decades! Poetry is no longer an exhibit in a Dust Museum.
Poetry is alive; poetry is allowed.
(Algarín and Holman 1994, 1–2)
Rap and performance or slam poetry are closely intertwined, especially at
the Nuyorican, which became famous for its Poetry Slam program.
The Nuyorican Poets Cafe presents over ninety Slams and elects somebody “Nuyorican Grand Slam Champion” every year. A “Poetry Slam” can
be defined as an event that “involves a group of poets” performing “their
work to an audience—members of this audience then score the poet’s
poem and performance” (Kane 2003, 203). This makes slam poetry—in
contrast to any other form of literary “communication,” even to poetry
readings where the audience remains quiet—an interactive event in the
strict sociological sense of the term where presence is a sine qua non. The
weekly Poetry Slams at the Nuyorican are mock-Olympic contests “judged
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by people selected at random from the audience,” it says in the “about us”
section of the Cafe’s homepage; the judges, Algarín explains in Aloud, “will
rate the poem from zero (‘a poem that should never have been written’)
to ten (‘mutual simultaneous orgasm’) using the ‘Dewey decimal rating
system’ to avoid ties” (Algarín and Holman 1994, 16). The main event
every week is the “Friday Night Slam.” Right after the Slam every Friday
night, there is an event called “The Open Room” where anyone can bring
a poem and read. A way of qualifying for Friday is the “Open Slam” every
Wednesday: winners of a Wednesday Night Open are then allowed to slam
on Friday night. In his introduction to the Aloud anthology, Algarín says
that these Open Nights have become “the trial ground for ‘slammers’ to
practice away from the blinding spotlight of the Friday night Poetry Slams.
. . The Open Room is where a ‘virgin’ poet takes the first steps to becoming a performing poet” (Algarín and Holman 1994, 26–27). According to
Algarín, the “Open Room” is one of the founding ideas that was there right
from the beginning of the Nuyorican Poets Cafe in 1974: “In the early days
of the Cafe (1974–1982), the hosts of the room were mainly Miguel ‘Lobo’
Loperena and Lois Griffith. At the end of the bar, Lobo or I would stand
with a ledger and a pencil and simply enter the names of the people who
came to perform in order of arrival, so that a famous poet dropping in for
the evening could be preceded by a first-time poet” (Algarín and Holman
1994, 23). I infer from this narrative that the Nuyorican Poets Cafe has
always greatly contributed to the democratization of verse culture, which
is certainly true: it has always been open to commonality and has always
fostered equality.
Democratization has been a constant at the Cafe, which also becomes
evident in the two poetry anthologies from 1975 and 1994. Before I deal
with some changes that occurred in the time between these two dates
of publication, and before I discuss some poetic texts that illustrate the
changes, I would like to mention two other constants, both of them less
political than aesthetic. These two constants revolve around presence and
conventionality. When we read Algarín’s texts about Nuyorican poetry and
the Poets Cafe, we discern that there has always been an orientation toward
an aesthetics of presence; and when we read poems from either of the two
anthologies, we notice their poetic conventionality. What has changed is
the “lyric I” of this conventional poetry; and this change has to do with
the shift of focus from ethnicity to performance, a shift that becomes very
obvious once we look into the anthologies from 1975 and 1994.
The constants I mentioned are just as interrelated as the changes. If
poet and audience try to interact within the framework of an aesthetics of
presence, the poetic text, in order to be perceived as pleasing, should not be
too unconventional and complicated but rather instantly accessible—here
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and now. By saying “pleasing,” I intend to imply, with the widest possible
slam audience in mind, something beautiful that gives one a feeling of
pleasure. Think of Algarín’s definition of a perfect ten: “mutual simultaneous orgasm.” Very often, spoken-word poems are not exactly cerebral or
heavily tropological; instead, they are written “with the intent to get the
point across,” says Crystal Williams, a young African-American slam poet
and member of the New York slam team (Beach 1999, 215). In general,
performance poets do not provide their listeners with riddles to ponder.
If they do, I call them sublime performance poets, because they are aweinspiring through difficulty; they show up “a relation to what exceeds
human capabilities of understanding” (Culler 2000, 76); they overwhelm
their audience—here and now. One might think of the film Slam (1998)
in this context, where, in the central sequence, the Saul Williams character
Raymond Joshua performs a poem and then leaves his listeners, warring
gang members, completely baffled and puzzled in the prison yard. Like
Saul Williams, some of these sublime performance poets tend to work out
of surreal and/or Hip Hop traditions. In Hip Hop, especially avant-garde
rap, where outdoing others in an unconventional and hermetic way is held
in high esteem, the listener is often perplexed by the verbal complexity of
the text presented.
In his book Production of Presence, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht writes
“that every human contact with the things of the world contains both a
meaning- and a presence-component, and that the situation of aesthetic
experience is specific inasmuch as it allows us to live both these components in their tension” (2004, 109); considering this, I am inclined to
say that in the two forms of aesthetic experience just described as the
beautiful and the sublime one, the meaning-component dominates the
presence-component. Even when we listen to a performed text, is it not
mainly the meaning-dimension that determines our aesthetic experience?
When we are listening to or watching someone performing a text, the
presence-component is certainly stronger than when we are reading a text,
but it probably is still weaker than the meaning-component. Seen from
this theoretical perspective, the Nuyorican movement toward an aesthetics of presence has always already been limited. Nevertheless, one can see
an obsession with presence in Algarín’s writing; he conjures it up with
great verve. There is phonocentricity: “speech comes first,” Algarín writes
in his introduction to the 1975 anthology (19). He also puts emphasis on
physicality, on body contact, and aggression when he says, “the Nuyorican
poet is to the people what the street fighter is to the crowd. The crowd
stops to look, to listen and admire his performance. . . The Nuyorican poet
fights with words” (Algarín and Piñero 1975, 23). The most significant
statements for the development of an aesthetics of presence can be found
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The poems in this anthology are in the dance of the moment. . . To cut into
the immediate moment and deliver an image of what is going on and then
move on so that the next image is fresh and alert to the ever-changing present is the business of the poet. . . Once the common ground and action of
the poem are established, then what the poem becomes is the event of itself.
The poem makes you pay attention, and makes you care. It is the moment
that imprints a cultural presence upon the world. Nuyorican poetry is the
talk of the ongoing. It is the event of the moment.
(Algarín and Piñero 1975, 181–82)
In a MELUS article from 1981, one year after the Cafe had moved to its
new location and one year before it closed again, Algarín evoked a very
community-oriented presence: he talked about carrying on the oral tradition, “the tradition of expressing self in front of the tribe, in front of the
family” (90); but in that article he already proclaimed the performativity
of Nuyorican culture: “The future will be procured by what we do that is
cultural in the present, so that we are not so much chasing the tradition
of a culture as we are putting it down” (90). The 1994 anthology begins
with Holman’s “invocation,” where he defines poetry as an art of presence:
“poetry is a contact sport!” he says (1). In his introduction, Algarín then
talks about the “theatricalization of poetry” and about the “interactive art”
of slam poetry (19), the “interactive relationship between the poet expressing and the listener absorbing and actively responding” (15, 18).
The quoted passages show that in Nuyorican poetry the meaningcomponent and the meaning/presence-tension are more complex than
I roughly outlined above. Let me take Algarín’s comparison of the poet
with the street fighter as an example: “The crowd stops to look, to listen
and admire his performance,” Algarín says. What becomes evident here is
Christopher Beach’s point that performed poetry “needs to be analyzed
according to a social and cultural semiotics that takes into account” not
only the oral and written poetic text, but also “the visual context provided
by the text’s performance” (1999, 134). In Algarín’s poet/street fighter
analogy, the relative weight of the two components is almost equal; and
as far as the visual context is concerned, the presence-component clearly
dominates the meaning-component. So, for an aesthetics of presence there
are also other values to be considered, other than complexity with regard
to textual form and content, of course.
Following Richard Middleton’s book Studying Popular Music,
Christopher Beach provides a six-value-model that is also useful for the
in Algarín’s “Afterword” to the first anthology, where he stresses the eventcharacter of Nuyorican poetry:
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analysis of Nuyorican oral, spoken word, and performance poetry, the
kind of art that Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno always warned us about.
Some of the values that Beach mentions can also be found in the presenceevoking statements by Algarín just quoted: there are positional values, “the
way in which individual tastes and values intersect with group norms”;
ritual values, the way in which the poem, reading, or performance “creates
solidarity or constitutes a special world for both performer and audience”;
and erotic values, “how the poem or performance involves, energizes, or
structures the body.” What is also important, especially in early, bilingual,
and monoethnically based Nuyorican poetry are political values, “how the
poem mobilizes explicit political content,” orientation, or even action. The
last two values that Beach mentions intersect with the constant of conventionality that can be seen in Nuyorican poetry from the 1970s until today:
communicative values, “the way in which the poem ‘says something’ that
can be seen by its audience as understandable, interesting, appropriate, relevant, or adequate”; and technical values, “how successfully the poem makes
reference to familiar codes, norms, and standards” (Beach 1999, 134). All
this has to be taken into account when we deal with the integration of
art and everyday environments, with art as embodiment of a whole life
context, “Kunst als Verkörperung eines ganzen Lebenszusammenhangs,”
the coeditor of the journal Musik & Ästhetik, Richard Klein says, referring
to popular music and John Dewey’s pragmatist aesthetics (2004, 340). At
the Nuyorican, “lebensweltliche,” physical, and performative contexts have
to be taken into consideration (340): for example, show, ambience, body
images, performer/audience relationship, and the crowd’s affective excitement or even arousal caused by the live situation are at least as important
as the text presented. Work from the Nuyorican Poets Cafe must not be
reduced to what can be written down. Nuyorican poetic endeavor should
not only be judged by textual and formal criteria; reproaching it for its
literary conventionality falls short of its complex aesthetics.
Nevertheless, in regard to literary history, interpretive expectations,
and Adorno’s position “einer kategorialen Immanenz des Materials,” one
cannot fail to notice the conventionality of Nuyorican poetry (Klein 2004,
339). This is also partially intended, though, as one could see in some of
Algarín’s and Holman’s statements above, the Nuyorican Poets community
defines itself, to a certain extent, “in opposition to . . . the mainstream
academic community and the avant-garde or experimental community,”
which Christopher Beach says about the slam community in general
(1999, 149). Thinking of the avant-garde community from the mid-1970s
to the mid-1990s, especially of the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E-movement,5 I
see more of a clash than a “fortunate fusion of avant-garde sensibilities”
and Nuyorican “populist sympathies” (Beach 1999, 125), but with the
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mainstream academic community Nuyorican poets share a lot of conventions. They write poetry that corresponds to certain sets of interpretive
conventions and expectations that are questioned neither by mainstream
academic nor pop-cultural nonacademic audiences. Nuyorican Poets
encourage, most of them not deliberately, I suppose, “the approach to the
lyric expounded and exemplified by the New Criticism,” which probably
still is “the only theory of the lyric to gain wide currency and influence”
(Culler 1985, 38). In Northrop Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism, we read that
the lyric is “preeminently the utterance that is overheard” (1957/1990,
249); this definition goes back to an article titled “Thoughts on Poetry and
its Varieties” (1833), in which John Stuart Mill aphoristically distinguishes
between poetry and eloquence: “Poetry and eloquence are both alike the
expression or utterance of feeling. But if we may be excused the antithesis,
we should say that eloquence is heard, poetry is overheard” (Mill 2002, 57).
In M. H. Abrams’ classic Glossary of Literary Terms, “lyric” is defined as
“any fairly short poem, consisting of the utterance by a single speaker, who
expresses a state of mind or a process of perception, thought, and feeling”
(1993, 108). This makes one think of the subtitle of the 1975 Nuyorican
Poetry anthology: it is called An Anthology of Puerto Rican Words and
Feelings. A lot of Nuyorican poetry conforms to what Jonathan Culler calls
the conventions of speaker and context reconstruction, unity and autonomy, and the convention of significance: when it comes to Nuyorican texts,
it is a quite rewarding approach to “imagine or reconstruct a speaker and
a context,” to “infer the posture, situations, concerns, and attitudes of a
speaker (sometimes coinciding with what we know of the author, but often
not)”; to read the poem “as if it were an aesthetic whole,” so that all the
parts “fit together harmoniously,” and to treat the poem as if it was “about
something important” (Culler 2000, 74–80). These analytical conventions
go together with certain immanent conventions, which have also contributed to the popularization of Nuyorican poetry:6 Nuyorican texts generally
do not require a very high level of literary competence; they are formally
and semantically accessible; their transparent and “natural” language is
often instantly understandable; most often, Nuyorican poems still adhere
to the poetic norm of the 1960s—free verse and the confessional mode.
This, Phillip Mehne rightly says in his article “Making It Strange,” includes
an orientation to spoken language, to speaking as a physical act (Olson),
and to an accusatory and denunciatory voice (Ginsberg, “Howl”), which
is, as Mehne also mentions, the kind of orientation that some avant-garde
communities opposed, especially the so-called Language poets in the
1970s and 80s, for example Lyn Hejinian (2003, 540–41). In “Barbarism,”
the paper that she gave in Australia in 1995, one year after the publication
of Aloud, the second Nuyorican anthology, Hejinian explains that what
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she and other Language poets had challenged and called into question was
“the poetry of the self,” “the romantic, unitary, expressive self, the ‘I’ of the
lyric poem” (2000, 330, 329).
This “I” is immensely important in Nuyorican poetry, which is basically a poetry of the self, where poetic voice is a central aspect but also a
rather complex issue connected with lingual and vocal diversity, performativity, ethnicity, race, class, and gender, as I will show in the following
partial readings of paradigmatic poems taken from Nuyorican Poetry and
Aloud. From the first to the second anthology the Nuyorican “I” changed
and developed. All in all it can be said that there was a shift of emphasis
from ethnicity to performance, from bilingualism as an ethnic feature to
bilingualism as a matter of genuinely free choice, from bilingualism to
monolingualism, and from monovocalism to multivocalism.
In the first anthology, in Miguel Algarín’s poem “Mongo Affair,” the
speaker is a particular ethnic “I” that closely resembles the bilingual
Nuyorican poet of Puerto Rican descent. The impression of a straightforward case of autobiographical self-expression is evoked by the identification of the “I” with the first name of the poet. Even the poet’s friends and
the cofounders of the Nuyorican Poets Cafe are explicitly addressed: Miguel
“Miguelito” Piñero, Lucky Cienfuegos, and Bimbo Rivas. With its three
bilingual addressees and its genealogical dimension, the poem creates group
solidarity and therefore stresses its positional and ritual values. The fourth
addressee of the poem is “a black Puerto Rican” from the Island, a “viejo
negro africano” (Algarín and Piñero 1975, 53). So three participants in the
poem’s discourse—the poet, the speaker, and the addressees—belong to an
almost completely homogeneous group, as far as Puerto Rican descent and
origin are concerned. Only the fourth participant, the reader or listener of
the poem, could also be non-Puerto Rican, for example Anglo-American.
The ability of an English-Only reader or listener to understand what the
speaker says would be somewhat limited, of course, but with its communicative and political values, the poem has something important to say also
to the dominant Anglo section of American society, for example about the
postcolonial social condition of lower-class Puerto Rican males. With its
Puerto Rican Spanglish speaker and poet, the poem implies a one-to-one
correlation between bilingualism and a people. This changes in the second
anthology, where the idea of a “new internationalism,” a truly postethnic
inter-American verse culture, supersedes the cultural nationalism of the
first anthology (Algarín and Holman 1994, 20).
In his introduction to Aloud, Algarín states that “Nuyorican language
is no longer the property of Puerto Ricans speaking in a blend of English
and Spanish” (20). He praises the bold “multilingual expressiveness” of
non−Puerto Rican U.S.-American artists who are “confronting languages
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in their willingness to stand before live audiences and speak in Spanish.
They speak their feelings in Spanish. . . . They are . . . attempting complex
intense communications in the Spanish language and are fearless about
accents or mispronunciation. They are intent on diving into the endless
possibility of multilingual expressiveness. . . Gone are the days when English
would remain the only means of expression for North American artists.
(Algarín and Holman 1994, 20)
An artist in the anthology who in her poetic performance uses a language that is usually not associated with her ethnic identity is the African
American female poet Tracie Morris, the 1992 Nuyorican Grand Slam
champion and the 1993 National Haiku Slam champion. By performing
as an African American speaker of English who uses some Spanish, Morris
questions—verbally and visually, certainly in a more impressive way than
on the page—the set of attributes ascribed to different ethnic groups. Her
Spanglish poem “Morenita,” which offers a transnational, global view of
“blackness,” ends with the words “Morenita of the world” (Algarín and
Holman 1994, 106).
Another African American poet who sometimes uses Spanish in his
performance work is Reg E. Gaines; apparently he can, from memory,
recite some of the most important Spanish and bilingual poems by Lucky
Cienfuegos and Miguel Piñero from the mid-1970s (Algarín and Holman
1994, 20). The Gaines poem I will discuss is monolingual, but the issue
of poetic voice is more complex and performative than in the texts by
Algarín and Morris. “Please Don’t Take My Air Jordans” got into Aloud’s
first section (“Poetry into the Twenty-First Century”) and came out on CD
in the same year, in 1994. With his poem and performance, Gaines makes
reference to several familiar codes, to a particular tradition and style, and
to certain intertexts. If we follow Shira Wolosky’s elucidating analysis of
“poetic voice” and assume that the “first-person ‘I’ is always, in some sense,
a seduction,” that “any use of a first-person voice initiates . . . an identification” of the reader, viewer, or listener with the “I” who speaks (2001, 111),
we can say that this effect is supposed to be amplified on Gaines’ CD by
the rhythmic “cool brother” oral presentation, the diction, and the musical
accompaniment that evokes 1970s blaxploitation soundtracks and strong,
streetwise figures. For an audience that knows the black vernacular tradition, the text’s form also reinforces this effect of identification: “Please
Don’t Take My Air Jordans” is in the tradition of secular rhymes, songs,
other than English and involving themselves in the exploration of selfexpression in other forms of speech” (20). “They are daring,” Algarín says
enthusiastically, daring
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and ballads. With its rhyming couplets and strophic organization—the
four-line stanza—it refers to one of the most popular ballads in AfricanAmerican culture, the “Sinking of the Titanic.” Shine, the protagonist of
this ballad, who survives all the upper-class white people on the ship, is
a paradigmatic character in this tradition, in which one can find praise
songs to heroes such as him, John Henry, The Signifying Monkey, or
Stackolee. In the headnotes to the section “Secular Rhymes and Songs,
Ballads, Work Songs, and Songs of Social Change” of the Norton Anthology
of African American Literature, these heroes are described like this: most
of the heroic ballad figures are “fast-talking” male characters “of action
and, if necessary, violence,” black badman figures who can outsmart white
authority—“The Man”—but can peel his cap back, too, “with an oversize
gun”; these positive hero and badman forms “have had a strong impact
on the blues,” and, of course, “on rap music” (Gates and McKay 2004, 26).
In Gaines’ “rap-meets-poetry” text we have a negative antihero, though. If
we think of (black) kids who often seem to be victims of the fashion label
industry, we can clearly see the poem’s communicative value and pedagogical function. Gaines stages a persona with whom he criticizes materialism and a transnational “urban consumer and fashion culture” (Kane
2003, 204). So the issue of poetic voice is quite complex and orchestrated
here. What we have to deal with are different voices, different stances,
positions, or points of view. The persona’s voice and the poet’s voice work
against each other: what the character asserts, the poet subverts (Wolosky
2001, 111). In the case of “Please Don’t Take My Air Jordans,” the result for
the reader, listener, or viewer indeed is—as Shira Wolosky says about “the
four-part construction,” including poet, speaker, auditor, and reader—“a
mixed experience of critical detachment and judgment, on the one hand,
against the speaker; and yet also of being implicated in the speaker’s presentation” (111). There are multifarious ways of reception: according to
Wolosky, the reader’s experience can be described as “shifting between”
the poet’s and the speaker’s voice “in varying degrees of identification and
detachment” (111), which also depend on ethnic, class, gender, and age
affiliations, of course.
Gaines stages a voice whose realness and authenticity of self-expression
are not questioned. This is different in the last two poems from the
Aloud anthology that I am going to discuss. In “Well?” a text from the
“Open Room” section, the Jamaican dub-poet Everton Sylvester makes
his character question the seriousness of his utterance. In the poem that
I want to discuss before, “Sex Goddess of the Western Hemisphere,” the
Latina poet and performer Maggie Estep stages a voice that is—unlike
the one of Gaines’ speaker—not only performative to the extent that
it performs “actions of stating and describing,” as Jonathan Culler says
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about constative utterances, but that it brings into being the thing that it
names publicly, in front of the addressee and the audience (Culler 2000,
96): the performer enacts a performative voice that brings into being the
speaker’s identity. Here, the “I” is further de-essentialized. We are far away
now from the honesty, seriousness, and fullness of Algarín’s bilingual but
monovocal ethnic “I” in “Mongo Affair.” Estep’s poem “Sex Goddess of the
Western Hemisphere” is a paradigmatic example of the development of
the Nuyorican Poets Cafe from an ethnically centered location of (oral)
literature to a transethnic performance venue. The speaker points to her
own performative rhetorical operations that bring her identity as “sex goddess” into being. She is bold enough to not even claim that the constative
utterance “I am the Sex Goddess of the Western Hemisphere” “represents
what is,” that it names things that are already there (Culler 2000, 100−101).
Instead of implicitly claiming that, she says: “I am / if only for the fact that
I have / the unabashed gall / to call / myself a SEX GODDESS” (Algarín
and Holman 1994, 63). These lines of the text illustrate what Erika FischerLichte says about the performative act: it is non-referential, which means
that it does not refer to something given, a substance or an essence that
could be expressed; there is no such thing, Fischer-Lichte writes, as an
expressible, a fixed and stable identity. In this sense, she continues, expressiveness is diametrically opposed to performativity (2004, 37).
“I am if only for the fact that I have the unabashed gall to call myself a
Sex Goddess.” The political value of this sentence is that it is uttered by a
female speaker and that it implicitly criticizes male-dominated discourses
that conceal their performativity and often claim to represent things as
they are. With her female speaker, Estep also acts against traditional female
role expectations and violates inherited norms. In her exploration of
“Gender and Poetic Voice,” Shira Wolosky writes that, “through the ages,”
modesty has been “asserted as a specific, and defining, female norm. Again
and again in poetry by women, modesty serves as a central mode of selfrepresentation. It may even be called a specific (and specifically feminized)
topos, the modesty topos” (2001, 121). Maggie Estep does not adhere to
this topos. She did not construct her speaker with restraint; her female
poetic voice is not “pointedly humble, woven of concession, apology, and
self-deprecation” at all (Wolosky 2001, 124)—quite the opposite in fact: it
is decidedly immodest. Estep’s female speaker is impolite, rude, and not
shy about attracting sexual interest. On the CD, these attributes are backed
up by punkish music, where rebellious attitudes and postures like Estep’s
are part of the conventional role expectations. Estep’s text and her vocal
performance on CD also remind us of important conventions in African
American and transnational Hip Hop culture: the aggressive performative
acts of bragging and boasting.
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The last poem I am going to discuss is an excellent example of another
performative speech act we know from Hip Hop: dissing. To “diss” someone
means to disrespect him or her. Everton Sylvester’s “Well?” can make us
believe in Bob Holman’s statement that “poetry is a contact sport”; it perfectly illustrates what it means to get words in your face. “Well?” is a dramatic
monologue, a poem of resentment which seems to be a speech taken from
some dramatic encounter between a rich but otherwise socially underprivileged character and someone he addresses, a person who has more symbolic
and cultural capital than the speaker. From the outset, there are two points
of view inscribed into the poem: the speaker’s and the addressee’s. Poetic
voice is dominated by the class dimension, the diction of the speaker, and the
performative act of dissing. Although the poem is from the Aloud anthology,
from its “Open Room” section, it could, because of its lower-class bias, also
fit into the 1975 anthology of Nuyorican poetry. What does not really come
to the fore, though, is the issue of ethnic identity, which seems to have been
forced back by the class-motivated performative act of injurious speech, of
hate speech. In Judith Butler’s book Excitable Speech we read that
hate speech constitutes its addressee at the moment of its utterance; it does
not describe an injury or produce one as a consequence; it is, in the very
speaking of such speech, the performance of the injury itself, where the
injury is understood as social subordination. What hate speech does, then,
is to constitute the subject in a subordinate position.
(Butler 1997, 18)
In Everton Sylvester’s poem, a persona from the dominated classes enacts
domination with speech, and thereby assumes agency and gains a temporary position of power. But maybe, he says, he’s just joking. What’s the
difference?
In conclusion, I would like to draw a distinction between two different
tendencies in transnational Nuyorican poetry: some of it—mostly early
Nuyorican work such as Bimbo Rivas’ “Loisaida” and Miguel Algarín’s
“Mongo Affair”—is based on serious monovocal expressiveness and the
idea of a given ethnic and lingual identity reaching beyond Puerto Rico
to the U.S. mainland and to Africa; and some of it, such as the more contemporary Nuyorican work by African American and Latino performers
like Reg E. Gaines, Maggie Estep, Jamaican dub-artist Everton Sylvester,
and Tracie Morris, de-essentializes transnationalism and playfully brings
up the issues of multivocalism (“Please Don’t Take My Air Jordans”), performativity (“Sex Goddess of the Western Hemisphere,” “Well?”), and of
ethnic and lingual identity as performance (“Morenita”).
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1. Gómez-Peña’s performance piece “The New World Border” refers to the U.S.Mexican border, but I think that the term is also an apt one for referring to
the Nuyorican cultural space, because the word “border” can be used in a
more figurative way. See, for example, Ed Morales’ “Spanglish Manifesto,” the
introduction to his book Living in Spanglish: “There is, of course, the border,
the literal region of the Rio Grande, where Mexico blurs into the United States
and vice versa. At the border, an obvious and often awkward mixing of cultures
takes place that makes up the superficial idea of Spanglish. But the border also
exists deep within the territory of North America, now more than ever, in its
major cities; it is an imported border that is expressed through a dynamic,
continuing recombination of cultures. That is the Spanglish way . . . Spanglish
is the ultimate space where the in-betweenness of being neither Latin American
nor North American is negotiated. When we speak in Spanglish we are expressing not ambivalence, but a new region of discourse that has the possibility of
redefining ourselves and the mainstream, as well as negating the conventional
wisdom of assimilation and American-ness” (Morales 2002, 4, 95).
2. “It ain’t where you from, it’s where you at” is a quotation of non-Nuyorican
origin. It is a line from “In the Ghetto,” a text by the African American rapper
Rakim. “In the Ghetto” is on the album Let the Rhythm Hit ’Em, which came out
in 1990 when Rakim still formed a Hip Hop group together with Eric B.
3. In Graham Hodges’ article about the Lower East Side, which “comprehends the
East Village, Chinatown, Little Italy, Tompkins Square, Astor Place, and the housing
development Knickerbocker Village,” we learn that “some of the first settlers in the
area were free black farmers who moved to the Bouwerie . . . The first tenements
in the city were erected near Corlear’s Hook in 1833, and Irish immigrants settled
in the northern section along the Bowery. Kleindeutschland developed north of
Houston Street in the 1840s. The 1880s saw an influx of Italians, Jews from eastern
Europe, Russians, Romanians, Hungarians, Ukranians, Slovaks, Greeks, and Poles.
One of the largest ethnic enclaves was a Jewish one that in 1920 had a population
of 400,000 . . . The neighborhood became the first racially integrated section of
the city after the Second World War, when thousands of blacks and Puerto Ricans
moved there . . . Poets, writers, and musicians found social tolerance and cheap
food and housing in the northern section, which became the center of the beat
movement; 4th Avenue was soon the site of many secondhand bookstores. By the
1960s most Jewish and eastern European residents had moved out of the neighborhood, which in the following decade was beset by persistent poverty, crime, drugs,
and the abandonment of housing. The area stabilized to some degree in the 1980s,
and its inexpensive housing attracted venturesome students and members of the
middle class, as well as immigrants from China, the Dominican Republic, the
Philippines, the United Kingdom, Poland, Japan, Korea, India, and Bangladesh. In
its southern reaches the Lower East Side is heavily Chinese” (Hodges 1995, 697).
4. Think of RZA’s CD The World According to RZA, for example, which documents
the multilingual dimension of transnational Hip Hop culture by featuring
Notes
HARALD ZAPF
artists rapping in Scandinavian and African languages, in Turkish, Italian,
English, French, and German. In the booklet of his CD, the African American
producer and rapper RZA says that he “seeks to prove that there is no boundaries or barriers in Hip Hop.”
5. Coincidentally, the publication dates of the seminal anthologies Nuyorican
Poetry and Aloud, 1975 and 1994, almost exactly mark the period of the development of “Language writing,” which began around 1976 with Barrett Watten’s
This magazine; from 1978 to 1981 L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E magazine was published; Bruce Andrews’ and Charles Bernstein’s L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book
came out in 1984, ten years before the second Nuyorican anthology; in 1995,
Lyn Hejinian gave a retrospective paper on Language writing titled “Barbarism,”
which also got published in The Language of Inquiry (2000), Lyn Hejinian’s
important collection of essays.
6. The popular and conventional status of Nuyorican poetry raises up the old
undecidable questions about pop culture in capitalist societies: is it vernacular
folk culture, the free “expression of the people,” or is it mass culture (Culler 2000,
44), the expression of people who cannot or do not want to free themselves from
certain commodity conventions? Neither nor but both, I would say.
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136
“A Broader and Wiser
Revolution”: Refiguring
Chicano Nationalist Politics in
Latin American Consciousness
in Post-Movement Literature
Tim Libretti
I
n a 1999 essay addressing Chicano politics and society in the late
twentieth century, Martín Sanchez Jankowski asks, “Where have all the
nationalists gone?” This article will explore how the contemporary postmovimiento Chicano/a literary productions of Rolando Hinojosa, Graciela
Limón, Helena María Viramontes, and Cherríe Moraga have effectively
answered that question by developing narratives of political consciousness and struggle that do not discard the Chicano nationalist politics of
self-determination and decolonization but rather reassert the urgency and
necessity of those politics by elaborating and resituating those politics in
both an international context and in the context of a diversifying Latino/a
culture and identity in the United States. Part of the social and historical context in which I will study these works is that articulated by Juan
Gómez-Quiñones when he writes,
8
[I]n 1980 the Mexican was only one group among a growing Latin American
population in the United States, a population which now comprises all
Latin American nationalities. The ‘Mexican de Afuera’ became part of the
phenomenon of “America Latina de Afuera.” For better or for worse, this
phenomenon impacts to what extent Mexicans can pursue strictly Mexican
interests. Ironically, the political coming together of ‘La Raza Cósmica’ is
138
TIM LIBRETTI
occurring in the United States, but the immediate result in public discourse
has been to diminish adamant Mexican or Chicano assertion.
In looking at this “political coming together,” however, I will suggest that at
the literary level the Chicano assertion has not been diminished but rather
that these authors reassert Chicano politics. Indeed, it is precisely the
diversity of Latin American populations in the United States that makes
more urgent an awareness of the national conditions that have nurtured
the particular experiences, consciousnesses, and political interests, issues,
and needs of each group. Moreover, I will argue, one objective of postmovement Chicano/a literature, in grappling with the internationalization
of Latino identity, is precisely to foster a national consciousness that can
properly comprehend and resist the international conditions of neoimperialism euphemistically referred to as “globalization.” Graciela Limón,
for example, in her novel Erased Faces (2001) treats the Zapatista national
liberation movement not to undermine nationalist politics in favor of a
simplistic or facile transnationalism but to highlight relationships between
the national and the transnational, the individual and historical global
conditions. In her works The Day of the Moon (1999) and In Search of
Bernabé (1993), she explores the importance of understanding the content
of a displaced Latino/a or Latin American consciousness in the United
States in international terms by remembering the specific national context in which that consciousness and experience were nurtured. Likewise,
Viramontes undertakes a similar project in her collection The Moths
(1985), particularly in the way her tale “The Cariboo Café,” which explores
displaced Latino/as in the United States, relates to other stories that depict
the waning or aftermath of the Chicano movement. In these works, as in
Cherríe Moraga’s 1992 manifesto “Queer Aztlán,” we see an assertion and
reinvigoration of anti-colonial nationalist politics in relationship to other
national movements around the globe taking on persistent imperialist
assaults in the name of what Moraga calls “a broader and wiser revolution.”
In this essay, I will begin by looking at Moraga’s writing in order to outline
and emphasize what I see as the political evolution of movement politics in
post-movement literature and then somewhat more schematically suggest
ways we see those politics narratively encoded in the works of Hinojosa,
Limón, and Viramontes.
In developing the framework of what she sees as the “broader and
wiser revolution,” Moraga reaffirms the nationalist politics informing
the Chicano Movement of the 1960s and 1970s, situating her argument
for the necessity and continuing utility of anti-imperialist nationalist
(Gómez-Quiñones 1990, 195)
139
politics in the context of transnational relationships and politics. Moraga
conceptualizes nationalism, internationalism, and transnationalism not as
informing exclusive or contradictory political visions but rather as necessarily complementary, demonstrating the indispensability of the category
of the nation for its ability, in fact, to center a transnationalist political
vision—particularly an indigenous one—and to comprehend the complex
dialectical mediations between race, class, sexuality, and gender within the
racial patriarchal capitalist world system.
Indeed, in response to Jankowski’s question “Where have all the nationalists gone?” Moraga admits to a waning, or rather more of a deformation,
of the Chicano nationalist movement but denies its complete disappearance, challenging prevalent sociological narratives, such as we see in Earl
Shorris’ Latinos, that proclaim premature obituaries for the Chicano
Movement.1 “For me,” Moraga writes, “‘El Movimiento’ has never been a
thing of the past, it has retreated into subterranean uncontaminated soils
awaiting resurrection in a ‘queerer,’ more feminist generation” (148). What
threatened the Chicano Movement, Moraga argues, were the twinned
and linked forces of heterosexism and assimilation, or what she refers
to as “Hispanicization,” by which she means the elision of a specifically
Chicano identity into an overarching and all-encompassing category that
identifies and includes Latino peoples of all national backgrounds, erasing
the specific and meaningful material differences in these various groups’
historical experiences, material situations, cultural forms and values, and
hence specific political interests and exigencies.
Thus, against that analysis offered by Gómez-Quiñones above in which
he constructs a political historical narrative of the diminishing possibilities
for a specifically Chicano assertion in public discourse precisely because
of the growth of a Latino population comprised of all Latin American
nationalities, Moraga argues strenuously for the viability and necessity of reinvigorating the Chicano Movement and its nationalist politics
grounded in a historical comprehension of the specific socioeconomic
circumstances conditioning the Chicano experience. Indeed, throughout
“Queer Aztlán: The Re-formation of Chicano Tribe,” Moraga insists that
any decolonization movement “must be culturally and sexually specific”
(149), which is why she holds fast to the necessity of nationalist politics.
She explains,
REFIGURING CHICANO NATIONALIST POLITICS
Chicanos are an occupied nation within a nation, and women and women’s
sexuality are occupied within Chicano nation. If women’s bodies and those
of men who transgress their gender roles have been historically regarded
as territories to be conquered, they are also territories to be liberated.
Feminism has taught us this. The nationalism I seek is one that decolonizes
TIM LIBRETTI
the brown and female body as it decolonizes the brown and female earth.
It is a new nationalism in which la Chicana Indígena stands at the center,
and heterosexism and homophobia are no longer the cultural order of the
day. I cling to the word “nation” because without the specific naming of the
nation, the nation will be lost (as when feminism is reduced to humanism,
the woman is subsumed). Let us retain our radical naming but expand it to
meet a broader and wiser revolution.
(Moraga 1993, 150)
Moraga here reasserts the viability, utility, and necessity of the nation as
a radical political subject of decolonization to counter her implicit worry
that dismissing the nation as a political category or subject of resistance
to colonialism would, if not totally erase, certainly severely diminish the
meaningful tradition of political action in U.S. history and on the U.S.
terrain that nationalism has been. She is unwilling to scrap wholesale the
politics of nationalism because to do so would leave one without a language or category for signifying the racial oppression Chicanos experience
as an internally colonized nation. Moreover, it needs to be highlighted
that one reason Moraga clings so tenaciously to Chicano nationalism is
precisely because, against many contemporary theoretical developments
such as postcolonial theory, Moraga understands Chicanos as an internally
colonized nation within the U.S. nation-state. (As we will see later, it is
precisely the theory of internal colonialism that endows nationalist politics
with a transnational consciousness.) The point to be stressed here, though,
is that just as she is opposed to reducing feminism to humanism because
then the specific concerns of women’s political interests are elided, it seems
equally and implicitly true, though she does not directly state it, that subsuming Chicanos into the broader category of Latino or Latin American
would be similarly reductive, eliding the specific and place-bound political
concerns of Chicanos, that is, she does make reference to “the benign cultural imperialism of the Latin American Solidarity Movement” (Moraga
1993, 146). Indeed, it is precisely because of the diminishing possibilities
for a Chicano assertion that Gómez-Quiñones identifies which necessitate
the reinvigoration of Chicano nationalism.
For Moraga, it is important to note, the politics of nationalism as a
vehicle for challenging and resisting the conditions of colonization or
imperialist assault are neither ineffective nor obsolete. Chicanos as well as
many other peoples around the globe, particularly indigenous populations,
still, in her analysis, suffer under conditions of occupation. In this era of
postcolonial theory, nationalism has been under attack from even putatively radical theorists such as Paul Gilroy and, of special relevance to my
concerns here, from the Chicana feminist activist writer Ana Castillo.2 Each
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141
of these writers sees the nation as an exclusive and chauvinist entity, isolating their vision of nationalist politics to the regressive patriotisms based
on conceptions of racial purity that have resulted in such practices as the
genocidal processes of “ethnic cleansing.” They ignore nationalism’s progressive manifestations in national liberation movements against ongoing
and contemporary imperialist and colonialist assaults. Ignoring meaningful
Third World movements in the United States and abroad both historically
and in their contemporary manifestations, such as the Zapatista National
Liberation Movements in Chiapas, both Gilroy and Castillo, whom I see
as exemplars of prevalent and even dominant tendencies in contemporary
postcolonial theoretical approaches to nationalism, see nationalism as
exclusive and constraining in terms of defining political agency.3
Moraga, however, does not see nationalism itself as regressive, but
rather sees the meaningful politics of nationalism as a vehicle for decolonization movements as contaminated by or rendered ineffective and
regressive by sexist and heterosexist politics that undermine nationalism’s
liberatory objective of radical democratic self-determination. She insists,
for example, that,
El Movimiento did not die out in the seventies, as most of its critics claim;
it was only deformed by the machismo and homophobia of that era and
co-opted by ‘Hispanicization’ of the eighties. In reaction against AngloAmerica’s emasculation of Chicano men, the male-dominated Chicano
Movement embraced the most patriarchal aspects of its Mexican heritage.
For a generation, nationalist leaders used a kind of ‘selective memory,’
drawing exclusively from those aspects of Mexican and Native cultures that
served the interests of the male heterosexuals.
(Moraga 1993, 156)
In the context of contemporary theoretical developments that tend to
valorize globalization and internationalism over and against nationalism,
Moraga’s defense of nationalism’s relevance and her insistent analysis that
imperialism and colonization are still ongoing and contemporary practices that require resistance stands out. It is not by dismissing nationalism
that, for Moraga, we will achieve internationalism or transnationalism
but rather by reinvigorating nationalism with a queer feminist political consciousness that we can foster a “broader and wiser revolution” to
challenge oppressive and exploitative processes of globalization, which
we used to call, less euphemistically, imperialism. Moraga’s theoretical
stance and her positioning of herself as an intellectual, then, very much
echo and are in line with Frantz Fanon’s positioning of the intellectual
working under colonial conditions when he writes that “the most urgent
TIM LIBRETTI
thing for the intellectual is to build up his nation . . . It is at the heart of
national consciousness that international consciousness lives and grows.
And this two-fold emerging is ultimately the source of all culture” (Fanon
1963, 222). With this comparison, I want to stress that Moraga’s vision,
again, does not figure nationalism, internationalism, or transnationalism as mutually exclusive politics or categories but rather as necessarily
complementary.
Having said that, however, we must consider how exactly Moraga sees
these politics complementing one another. She is acutely aware in her
writings of a growing and diverse Latino population in the United States,
as she writes, for example, in her essay “Art in América con Acento,” that
“[i]ronically, the United States’ gradual consumption of Latin America
and the Caribbean is bringing the people of the Americas together. What
was once largely a chicano/mexicano population in California is now guatemalteco, salvadoreño, nicaraguense” (Moraga 1993, 55). Yet while the
gathering of these Latino populations and other “Third World” populations from places such as Vietnam and Cambodia—in addition to other
places, in Moraga’s analysis, that U.S. military invasions have displaced
and resulted in orphan populations—might create conditions for broader
Third World or transnational alliances, she hesitates to celebrate prematurely the emergence of La Raza Cósmica, that is, of a unified pan-Latin
American cultural identity or political constituency.4 Latinos, she suggests,
represent far too diverse a set of political identities, historical experiences,
and cultural groups to define in any rigorously, or even casually, coherent
way a cohesive population or political group. She does not see “the political coming together” that Gómez-Quiñones postulates, as indicated in his
quotation earlier. Instead, she asserts,
Latinos in the United States do not represent a homogenous group. Some
of us are native born, whose ancestors precede not only the arrival of the
Anglo-American but also of the Spaniard. Most of us are immigrants, economic refugees coming to the United States in search of work. Some of us
are political refugees, fleeing death squads and imprisonment; others fleeing revolution and the loss of wealth. Finally, some have simply landed here
very tired of war. And in all cases, our children had no choice in the matter.
U.S. Latinos represent the whole spectrum of color and class and political
position, including those who firmly believe they can integrate into the
mainstream of North American life. The more European the heritage and
the higher the class status, the more closely Latinos identify with the powers
that be. They vote Republican. They stand under the U.S. flag and applaud
George Bush for bringing “peace” to Nicaragua. They hope one day he’ll
do the same for Cuba, so they can return to their Patria and live a “North
American-style” consumer life. Because they know in the United States they
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143
will never have it all, they will always remain “spics,” “greasers,” “beaners,”
and “foreigners” in Anglo-America.
Because of these divisions and differences, which challenge the viability
and strain the political meaningfulness of a pan-Latin American identity,
Moraga identifies herself with a particular international Latin American
political constituency at the same time that she asserts her specifically
Chicana political identity. What needs to be stressed here is that she identifies with both constituencies in decidedly political terms, not in general
racial, ethnic, geographical, cultural, or national terms, thus narrowing
and specifying the constituency with which she identifies. She emphasizes
that she calls herself a Chicana writer as opposed to a Mexican American,
Hispanic, or half-breed writer, as she explains, “To be a Chicana is not
merely to name one’s racial/cultural identity, but also to name a politic, a
politic that refuses assimilation into the U.S. mainstream” (Moraga 1993,
56). Similarly, just as her being a Chicana entails her alignment with a particular anti-imperialist nationalist politics, so her Latin American internationalism is limited to an alignment with anti-imperialist politics in the
Latin American context. Thus, she begins the essay lamenting “the death of
the Nicaraguan revolution” (52) brought about by the U.S. government’s
imperialist policies and practices. As a Latina writer in the United States,
she feels the need to address the issue and dis-identify from the nationstate and its government that invade Latin American land. Her allegiances
and identifications with an international Latin American community
domestically and abroad and with a Chicana nationalism are clear in this
essay and are not mutually exclusive but rather mutually reinforcing, as
internationalist politics, she suggests, depend upon nationalist politics.
To put it more succinctly perhaps, Moraga’s transnationalist political
perspective is one that imagines a solidarity of nationalisms in a way that
harkens back to, or simply remains connected to and informed by, the
Third World movements in the United States in the 1960s. While the Third
World movements in the 1960s were predominantly defined by nationalist politics, they were not at all narrowly construed movements organized
around isolated racial identities. Rather, we saw as never before the adumbration of a racial internationalism and solidarity as people of color in the
United States, defining themselves as an internal Third World, united under
the broader rubric of “Third Worldism.” The movements had a global
resonance, identifying themselves as Third World movements in order to
highlight and articulate their connections with Third World nations abroad
also enduring colonization at the hands of U.S. and European nation-states.
(Moraga 1993, 56)
TIM LIBRETTI
The racial experience in the United States, the internal colonialism model
demonstrated, was an experience of colonization that needed crucially to be
distinguished from the experience of European ethnic immigrant minorities. It was a function of the operations and deployments of “race” on a
global scale within the capitalist world system characterized by imperialism
(what Lenin declared to be the highest stage of capitalism). Thus, the Third
World political consciousness developed out of these 1960s movements was
distinctly international and global in dimension and comprehension and
hardly narrowly separatist or culturally and politically isolated. In fact, the
Third World movements and their concomitant rich corpus of literary and
cultural production suggest themselves as not only viable but as crucial forerunners of and models for the development of a contemporary international
culture and consciousness—but one that emerges from and recognizes the
specificity of national experiences and the need for the achievement of
national sovereignty through national liberation and decolonization.
Thus, in Moraga’s writing, we see clearly this type of analytical understanding of the relationship between nationalism and transnationalism,
as she is able to speak of both in the same breath, seeing nationalism,
particularly of the indigenist variety, as the primary vehicle of resistance
to capitalist globalization. She writes, for example, in “Queer Aztlán: The
Re-formation of Chicano Tribe,”
The primary struggle for Native peoples across the globe is the struggle for
land. In 1992, 500 years after the arrival of Columbus, on the heels of the Gulf
War and the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the entire world is reconstructing itself. No longer frozen into the Soviet/Yanqui paradigm of a “Cold” and
invented “War,” Indigenous peoples are responding en masse to the threat of
a global capitalist “mono-culture” defended by the “hired guns” of the U.S.
military. Five hundred years after Columbus’ arrival, they are spearheading
an international movement with the goal of sovereignty for all Indigenous
nations. Increasingly, the struggles on this planet are not for “nation-states,”
but for nations of people, bound together by spirit, land, language, history,
and blood. This is evident from the intifada of the Palestinians residing within
Israel’s stolen borders and the resistance of the Cree and Inuit Indians in
Northern Quebec. The Kurds of the Persian Gulf region understand this, as do
the Ukrainians of what was once the Soviet Union. Chicanos are also a nation
of people, internally colonized within the borders of the U.S. nation-state.
144
(Moraga 1993, 168–9)
Indeed, the international struggle is for sovereignty for indigenous nations.
Moraga’s transnational imagination is rooted in a recognition of the situated nature or place-boundedness of political struggle and the specificity
of political and specifically national interests.
145
Thus, we see in Moraga’s post-movimiento writings not a dismissal
of the movement and its politics but a recontextualization of them in
transnational political movements in a way that reinvigorates and reaffirms them in the midst of a dizzying barrage of theoretical projections
of transnationalism, diasporic identities, and cosmopolitanism that often
obscure and simplistically dismiss nationalism. Moraga’s essay provides
us with a cultural and political logic that moves beyond what Sau-Ling
Wong has identified as a postmodernist diaspora model of denationalization based on an unwarranted optimism about the equalizing prospects
of globalization and the concomitant notion that “identity formation is
not correlated with a sense of belonging to any geographical or political
entity” (Wong 1995, 13) but rather with the development of a cosmopolitan, equally shared, and accessible world culture and economy. Moraga is
quite clear about the rootedness of identity and historical consciousness
in a geographical entity and about the need for reclaiming land in order to
experience self-determination.
Freedom is rooted in and requires a material space, Moraga suggests.
As a Chicana, her interests lie firmly in the United States, in reclaiming
occupied territory, as she writes, “I cannot flee the United States, my land
resides beneath its borders. We stand on a land that was once the country
of Mexico. And before any conquistadors staked out political boundaries, this was Indian land and in the deepest sense remains just that: a
land sin fronteras. Chicanos with memory like our Indian counterparts
recognize that we are a nation within a nation. An internal nation whose
existence defies borders of language, geography, race” (Moraga 1993, 54).
To be clear, this land “sin fronteras” is not one that Moraga imagines as
the end of nations in favor of a boundless cosmopolitan identity. Rather,
this phrase needs to be understood as a refusal to respect the borders of
nation-states and the authority of a state that has colonized and suppressed a people. The phrase invokes the original manifesto of the Chicano
movement, which she quotes in “Queer Aztlán”: “Aztlán belongs to those
who plant the seeds, water the fields, and gather the crops and not to the
foreign Europeans. We do not recognize capricious frontiers on the bronze
continent” (Moraga 1993, 159). Claiming, or reclaiming, freedom in the
forms of national sovereignty and self-determination requires reclaiming
a specific territory that does not necessarily any longer correspond with
the “capricious” geopolitical borders of the U.S. nation-state or any other
nation-state. Thus, the nations she imagines may very well be, in the context of contemporary geopolitical demarcations, transnational.
We can see, then, the importance of the distinction between “nations”
and “nation-states” that Moraga articulates above when she asserts that
“the struggles on this planet are not for ‘nation-states,’ but for nations
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of people, bound together by spirit, land, language, history, and blood”
(168–9). This conception of national identity—one that may be transnational in contemporary contexts—is one that informs a specifically
Chicano, as distinct from a more broadly Latino, political consciousness.
Rolando Hinojosa’s border fiction, for example, gives form to a national,
even transnational, identity that links the U.S. Third World with the
Third World abroad through the continual reenactment in storytelling of
moments of Mexican revolutionary uprising from 1848 through the 1930s.
The national consciousness Hinojosa’s work fosters through historical
recovery and cultural memory is one that crosses capricious borders, as we
see in the following storytelling episode from his novel The Valley (1983):
Those old men, and I’ll mention but three . . . were all born here, in the
United States, but they too fought in the 1910 revolution as did the Mexican
mexicanos. The parents of these men were also born in this country, as were
their grandparents; this goes back to 1765 and earlier, 1749. It may be curious for some, but it’s all perfectly understandable and natural for lower Rio
Grande borderers, as is the lay of the land on both sides of the border; and if
one discounts the Anglo Texans, well, the Texas Mexicans—or mexicanos—
and the Mexican Americans—the nacionales—not only think alike more
often than not, but they are also blood related as they have and had been for
one hundred years before the Americans had that war between themselves
in the 1860s; the river is a jurisdictional barrier, but that’s about it.
(Hinojosa 1983, 78)
This provocative passage reveals two elements centering the narration
of the nation. First, the passage portrays the incommensurability of
the jurisdictional or geopolitical boundaries of the nation-state, which
demarcate and signify the history of imperialist assault and colonization, with a people’s common cultural, historical, and even territorial
experience of nationhood. The Texas Mexicans and Mexico Mexicans,
Hinojosa suggests, are bound together as a nation or national identity
by the distinct and differential cultural ethos and historical experience
that defy geopolitical markers and inform a national consciousness that
does not correspond to that of the U.S. dominant culture. While the U.S.
citizens of European descent might identify the “American” revolution
against Britain or the Civil War as important moments in the birth and
development of the U.S. nation-state, these dates are rather meaningless
for the Texas Mexicans, as Hinojosa represents them in the passage above
referring to the Civil War as the war the Americans had “between themselves in the 1860s.” The historical moments that are meaningful are dates
such as 1749 and 1848 when “Americans” encroached upon the Mexican
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people and annexed their lands in the name of Manifest Destiny. For the
Texas Mexicans to forget this history would be to gloss over their very
mode of entry into the dominant U.S. socioeconomic system as a subordinated and colonized people already viewed as unequal. In this example
from Hinojosa’s fiction, then, we see the literary effort to foster a Chicano
national consciousness, based in a specific history and place, to inform a
struggle for “nations of people” against the U.S. nation-state. Even in the
context of a diversifying Latino population in the United States, we see in
both Moraga and Hinojosa, at the literary level of political struggle, the
reassertion of Chicano national identity as opposed to its dissolution in
a conception of pan-Latin American identity, such as La Raza Cósmica.
Indeed, precisely because, in Moraga’s words, “the material basis of every
nationalist movement is land” (170), the political consciousness developed
must have a national dimension constituted organically through a collective historical experience and cultural orientation.
For Moraga, in particular, it is these national struggles, especially
indigenous ones, that represent the most effective assault on the global
imperialist order. It is precisely a recognition of the international effects of
global capitalism that inspires and informs Moraga’s support of decolonizing national liberation movements around the globe. Likewise, I will suggest, if we look at other examples of post-movimiento Chicano literature
such as the fiction of Graciela Limón and Helena María Viramontes, we
see examples of an aesthetic that grapples much more “cosmopolitically”
than earlier Chicano literature with Latin American national experiences
and politics in relation to the United States government and peoples,
particularly Chicanos. While this fiction arguably works in part to foster
a transnational anti-imperialist political solidarity, it also highlights the
need to understand experiences and challenge oppressive and exploitive
political and socioeconomic structures on a national scale while contextualizing them and understanding them in the dynamics of global political
economies. In this sense, Limón’s and Viramontes’ fiction drives us back to
the necessity of nationalist politics as a means of resisting and challenging
neocolonial practices in global capitalism and thus also works effectively
as a call for the reinvigoration of a Chicano nationalism, much as Moraga
did in her manifesto “Queer Aztlán.”
Much of Limon’s fiction features settings outside of the United States,
focusing in particular on Central America and Mexico, at the same time
that this fiction, particularly the novels In Search of Bernabé, The Day
of the Moon, and Erased Faces, also involves characters crossing borders
between such countries as El Salvador, Mexico, and the United States.
While in the first two novels we see El Salvadoran and Mexican characters
migrating to the United States, representing a diversifying Latin American
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population in the United States, Limón underscores in her representation
of these experiences the necessity of performing a cognitive mapping that
not only retraces these characters’ histories and global migrations but also
resituates their histories and experiences in specifically national contexts
in order to comprehend that character and the formation of that character’s consciousness. Limón’s narratives suggest the need to comprehend
the specific national dimensions that nurture experience and consciousness and to distinguish between those specifically national experiences as
they inform different Latin American constituencies in the United States.
The differences in these national experiences, albeit conditioned perhaps
by the same system of global capitalism and by the similar behaviors of
U.S. imperialism, create populations whose specific political interests,
psychological orientations and needs, and social issues require a specific
understanding, diagnosis, and mode of address such that dissolving Latin
Americans of different national backgrounds into a singular category of
La Raza Cósmica becomes counterproductive to or at least premature
for cultural and political transformation. Thus, while Limón produces
Chicana narratives that are international in scope, they emphasize the
need to highlight the national dimensions that condition historical experience and consciousness in order to grasp important transnational relationships in their totality. Indeed, the transnational scope underscores the
importance of a nation-based politics and consciousness.
Likewise, in Erased Faces, just as Moraga wants to reinvigorate Chicano
nationalism, so Limón, I believe, writing as a Chicana in the post-movimiento
context, invokes the Zapatista struggle in part to highlight an actually
existing national liberation movement of an internally colonized nation
in order to remind Chicanos of the persisting need to fight against the
forces of internal colonization. This is why the novel features an American
woman of Mexican descent, Adriana Mora, connecting with the Zapatista
Movement in a way that motivates her confrontation with both the past,
the history of imperialist practice, and the present, its ongoing practice
and the ongoing resistance to it. Moreover, just as we see in In Search of
Bernabé and The Day of the Moon, the main character Adriana, in working
out her individual psychological issues, must finally confront and deal with
both personal and larger historical issues through a decolonization that
requires participating as an agent in a national liberation struggle. Thus,
psychotherapy, in these cases psychotherapeutic processes of decolonization and disalienation (as Fanon writes about), involves not just a talking
cure but a political participation in social and cultural transformation. In
a sense, then, like Moraga, Limón underscores that the nationalist politics
of decolonization are not obsolete or ineffective but that the conditions
that gave rise to them for Chicanos in the 1960s are still present in a way
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that necessitates a nationalist political response, for which the Zapatista
Movement can provide a model.
In both In Search of Bernabé and The Day of the Moon, Limón’s stories
emphasize the need of comprehending the national experiences of characters as a way of highlighting the complexities of Latino experiences in
the United States. In each work, she seems to indicate that a “return to the
source” is in order to understand the psyches and experiences of different
Latin American characters in the United States. One subplot of In Search of
Bernabé features Luz Delcano coming to the United States from El Salvador
in a desperate and somewhat disoriented search for her son Bernabé, from
whom she had become separated during the unrest following the assassination of Archbishop Romero in 1980. While living in Los Angeles with
Arturo, a young man whom Luz effectively adopts on her journey through
Mexico to the United States, the two experience an assault in their apartment by five masked men. They break Arturo’s bones and then shred him
with machine gun fire. While the event remains obscure, the implication in
the novel is that this murder is committed by El Salvadoran governmental
death squads. Limón’s purpose in leaving this moment obscure, though,
seems precisely to highlight the inability to comprehend this Latino experience as one conditioned by national conditions within, or at least solely
within, the U.S. borders. She writes,
When the police entered Luz’s apartment, it was difficult for them to process what had taken place. Rounds of machine gun bullets were extracted
from the walls, ceiling and floor, but investigators were unable to come up
with logical reasons for the brutality or to understand why the man had
been senselessly slaughtered while the woman had gone unharmed. Their
questions remained unanswered, and the police were left to decipher the
evidence on their own: a room ripped to shreds by gun fire, the body of a
young man nearly dismembered, and the enigma of a bloody hand print
plastered on the wall.
(Limón 1993, 85)
As we later learn, “The crime was officially recorded as gang related and
designated to be pursued by normal channels” (86). The suggestion here
is that the investigators cannot come up with “logical reasons” and the
slaughter looks “senseless” because the logic and sense used to comprehend the murder are too local and uninformed by the specific national
context of El Salvador’s sociopolitical dynamics. Thus we see that this
Latino experience cannot be understood solely in U.S. national terms
or that in order to understand this particular Latino experience in the
United States, we must possess a logic that comprehends not just a larger
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international context but a specific national context. The dialectical implication of this assertion is also that a Chicano political understanding must
also be rooted in its specific national dimensions.
We see a similar displacement of consciousness and experience in The
Day of the Moon, as the novel opens in Los Angeles, introducing us to the
aged and dying Flavio Betancourt, whose body is the United States but
whose consciousness is in Mexico. She begins the novel, writing,
Don Flavio Betancourt sat in the armchair, staring through the lace curtains
of his bedroom. His gaze was vacant as his eyes scanned the rainy landscape;
he was vaguely aware of the swishing sound each time a car drove past his
house. His mind, however, was somewhere else. It had escaped, as it did
nearly all the time now. The old man’s thoughts ran away from him, skipping west, skittering over rooftops, dashing upward, spiraling over the Sixth
Street Bridge, then turning south and rushing headlong toward Mexico.
(Limón 1999, 3)
The rest of the novel takes us back through the history of Don Flavio and
his family in Mexico. This history features Don Flavio’s rejection of his
mother and her Indian ancestry, his rise to the status of landed gentry
through a card game, and the punishment and repression of his daughter Isadora for loving an Indian of the Rarámuri tribe. Indeed, he finally
commits her to an asylum because of his own shame and his own sense of
injured social reputation and humiliation. This humiliation is exacerbated
by the fact that his wife Vela is the lover of his sister Brígida, who later,
on the basis of her own socially proscribed love relationship, encourages Isadora in her romantic choices. Later, after the family has moved to
Los Angeles, Brígida, racked with guilt because she believes she encouraged
Isadora in the behavior that led to her effective imprisonment, represses
this history and is unable and unwilling to discuss the sexual and racial history of the family with Alondra, the daughter of Isadora and el Rarámuri.
This repression of the past, a function of Brígida’s sudden enforcement
of the heterosexist and racist ideologies that inform the patriarchal class
system Limón represents as the legacy of Spanish colonization, has damaging consequences psychologically for Alondra. She is dysfunctional and
cannot hold a job, and Limón represents this dysfunction as a symptom
of her lack of a clear identity and historical consciousness. It is the housekeeper Ursula, a Rarámuri who came with the family to Los Angeles, who
finally reveals the true family history to Alondra. To heal, Alondra returns
to Mexico and to the indigenous Rarámuri tribe and regains psychic
health as she undergoes, effectively, a psychotherapeutic decolonization
as she reconnects with an indigenous culture that represents for Limón a
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harmonious cultural alternative to the racial patriarchal heterosexist colonial class system that damages all characters in the novel, even Don Flavio
who dies miserable, having sacrificed every meaningful relationship in
his life. At the end, Alondra remains in Mexico, unsure as to whether she
will return to the United States. Thus, to be stressed here, is that Limón’s
narration brings Alondra back to a specific place, the national context,
that informs her history, consciousness, and psychology. To reclaim her
identity in all its historical and psychological dimensions entails a kind
of physical revisiting, even a kind of reclamation, of a national space. In
the United States, she constituted a kind of displaced consciousness that,
I think Limon’s narrative suggests, cannot find wholeness through an
assimilation into a broad multinational Latino constituency in the United
States but that must confront the national historical and place-bound
dimensions of its formation.
Thus, Limón’s novel can be understood as a narrative realization of
Moraga’s political vision in “Queer Aztlán,” as she highlights the need for
Latino populations to develop an anti-colonial national consciousness
informed and indeed reinvigorated by, in Moraga’s terms, a queer and
feminist perspective. Erased Faces substantiates this perspective as well,
as part of Adriana Mora’s initial attraction to the Zapatista Movement is
her initially unwitting romantic attraction to Juana Galvan, a member of
the Zapatista national liberation army. The two end up having an intense
erotic and loving relationship that Limón represents as an important component of liberation—the reconnection with and expression of our libidinal and erotic selves. Galvan herself was drawn to the movement because
of its anti-patriarchal politics in part. Finally, in this novel, Adriana Mora
returns to the United States, which is her home, her national context, having brought with her the experiential model of a queer and feminist anticolonial national liberation movement to inform her political behavior in
the United States. Again, to be stressed is that the narrative of politicization
Limón creates drives characters back to specific national contexts, such
that while her works have an international scope and feature transnational
border-crossings, the intent is not at this point narratively to transcend
nationalism but to insist upon its necessity as a component of any kind of
political transnationalism.
Similarly, Helena María Viramontes’ collection of stories The Moths
represents an example of post-movement Chicano literature that deals
with broader Latin American experiences and issues in connection with
Chicano issues in a way that still, in its representations, insists on the
importance of national contexts for grounding and understanding experiences and for developing political identities. Just as Limón represents displaced consciousnesses, in her 1985 story “The Cariboo Café,” Viramontes
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represents the experiences of undocumented Latinos in the United
States as “displaced people” (65). The basic plot of the story involves two
undocumented children, Sonya and Mackey, who end up in the Cariboo
Café one day when Sonya loses her house key so that she cannot bring
her little brother home after school. Feeling unsafe in the world because
their parents constantly warn them of the dangers of La Migra, they seek
haven in the first place they can find. The cook and owner of the café, who
bears his own scars from having lost his son in the Vietnam War and his
own frustrations with his work life, is one who at once feels sympathy for
other downtrodden like undocumented workers and also tries not to get
involved in others’ problems even though he alerts la Migra to undocumented workers who seek refuge in his restroom. Nonetheless he treats
the children kindly and looks somewhat suspiciously on a woman who,
behaving strangely, approaches the children and leaves with them. He
later sees a news bulletin about the missing children and realizes they have
been kidnapped by the woman. When she later returns with the children
to the café, he calls the police after much internal conflict. When the police
arrive, the woman resists and the police shoot her because she will not let
go of the children. The form of the story is such, however, that the behaviors of the characters and their disorientation are confusing to the reader
until, as the story progresses, we learn the history of the characters, particularly that of the displaced woman, and learn of the national contexts and
experiences that motivate their migrations to the United States and inform
their movements in a U.S. world hostile to undocumented people.
As the story unfolds, Viramontes narratively charts connections between
exploitive, terroristic, and otherwise oppressive experiences in El Salvador
or El Salvador-like Latin American nations (the nation treated is not specifically identified in the story), which are enabled by U.S. political and
economic policies, and the treatment of people of color, undocumented
or otherwise, in the United States. In section three of the story, we learn
that the woman has likely lost her five-year-old son Geraldo to murderous
right-wing death squads who terrorize the population, labeling people at
will as contras or spies. Viramontes portrays the woman visiting detention camps where she witnesses imprisoned children being used as forced
labor to sort through body parts. It is this woman who, obviously having
migrated to the United States, “kidnaps” the children out of the traumainspired delusional belief that young Mackey is Geraldo. When the police
come, she “mistakes” them for the death squads and refuses to let them
take her children.
Of course, it is through this “mistake” that Viramontes suggests the
similarities between the Latin American experience abroad at the hands
of U.S. imperialism and the experience of U.S. imperialism at home. In
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153
both nations, the experience of the Latino is one of terror and colonization. Both Sonia Saldívar-Hull and Ellen McCracken similarly identify
this connection. Saldívar-Hull, for example, suggests that Viramontes’s
story “unravels her internationalist vision” and “propels feminism on the
border into its transnational trajectory by showing the emergence of Los
Angeles as a U.S. Third World city” (2000, 127). McCracken interprets “the
woman’s struggle against the police in Los Angeles as structurally homologous to other struggles in Latin American against oppressive military
regimes” such that her struggle “links Latinos in the United States to those
in Latin America” (1999, 51). While both of these readings highlight the
international and transnational dimensions of Viramontes’ vision, neither
asserts the simultaneous concrete national—and nationalist—groundings
of the story. McCracken even subsumes the specificities of the Chicano/a
national experience under the broader rubric of “Latino.” I would like to
suggest comprehending the narrative as analytically recalling the internal
colonialism model discussed earlier, which was a hallmark of the political
analysis informing Chicano nationalism. Like Moraga, Viramontes does
not depart from the politics of anti-colonial nationalism but rather underscores their necessity through the international scope of the story that
highlights the need for us as readers to grasp the specific national contexts
that have nurtured characters’ experiences and consciousness in order for
us to understand them.
Thus, in the writings I have studied in this chapter, I hope to have
pointed to ways in which post-movement Chicano literature sustains the
category of nation and the politics of nationalism as a mode of mediation
in a dialectical or dialogic process, such that nationalism is not opposed to
but is rather an avenue toward imagining transnationalism. In the intellectual tradition of Third World thinkers like Fanon, nationalism is a way
of opening up communication. As Fanon wrote, “The consciousness of
self is not the closing of a door to communication. Philosophic thought
teaches us, on the contrary, that it is its guarantee” (1963, 247). Indeed,
for the Chicana/o writers I have studied, transnationalism depends upon
anti-colonial nationalisms, not upon the disappearance of anti-colonial
national political subjects. To conclude with Fanon’s profound words,
“And now it is time to denounce certain Pharisees. National claims, it is
here and there stated, are a phase that humanity has left behind. It is the
day of great concerted actions, and retarded nationalists ought in consequence to set their mistakes aright. We however consider that the mistake,
which may have very serious consequences, lies in wishing to skip the
national period” (247). While, as Moraga compellingly suggests, national
claims require a “queer” feminist revision, they are alive and well in contemporary Chicana/o literature.
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1. Moraga provides the following quotation from Shorris: “The Chicano generation began in the late 1960s and lasted about six or eight years, dying slowly
through the seventies” (1993, 148).
2. Castillo, for example, writes, “Nationalism throughout the history of civilization excludes certain groups that will inevitably feel intimidated and react in
like manner. Through territorial invasions, ethnic divisions, racist contempt for
others, and ongoing oppression of women, nationalism always finds its justification for manipulation for power” (1995, 239).
3. For a more extensive discussion of the tendencies Gilroy and Castillo represent,
see Libretti 2002.
4. For a discussion of the concept of the cosmic race, see Vasconcelos 1948; Miller
2004.
References
Blauner, Robert. 1972. Racial Oppression in America. New York: Harper and Row.
Castillo, Ana. 1995. Massacre of the Dreamers: Essays on Xicanisma. New York:
Penguin.
Churchill, Ward. 1993. Struggle for Land: Indigenous Resistance to Genocide, Ecocide,
and Expropriation in Contemporary North America. Monroe, Maine: Common
Courage Press.
Fanon, Frantz. 1963. The Wretched of the Earth. New York: Grove Press.
Gómez-Quiñones, Juan. 1990. Chicano Politics: Reality and Promise, 1940–1990.
Hinojosa, Rolando. 1983. The Valley. Houston: Arte Público Press.
Juraga, Dubravka, and M. Keith Booker, eds. 2002. Rereading Global Socialist Cultures
After the Cold War: The Reassessment of a Tradition. Westport, CT: Praeger.
Libretti, Tim. 2002. Against Premature Internationalism: Reasserting the Necessity
of Nationalism for Socialist Liberation in the Age of Post-Theory. In Rereading
Global Socialist Cultures After the Cold War: The Reassessment of a Tradition, ed.
Dubravka Juraga and M. Keith Booker, 27–54. Westport, CT: Praeger.
Limón, Graciela. 1993. In Search of Bernabé. Houston: Arte Público Press.
———. 1999. The Day of the Moon. Houston: Arte Público Press.
———. 2001. Erased Faces. Houston: Arte Público Press.
McCracken, Ellen. 1999. New Latina Narrative: The Feminine Space of Postmodern
Ethnicity. Tucson: The University of Arizona Press.
Miller, Marilyn Grace. 2004. Rise and Fall of the Cosmic Race: The Cult of Mestizaje
in Latin America. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Moraga, Cherríe. 1993. The Last Generation. Boston: South End Press.
Muñoz, Carlos. 1989. Youth, Identity, and Power: The Chicano Movement. New York:
Verso.
Saldívar-Hull, Sonia. 2000. Feminism on the Border: Chicana Gender Politics and
Literature. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Notes
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Sanchez Jankowski, Martín. 1999. Where Have All the Nationalists Gone? Change
and Persistence in Radical Political Attitudes Among Chicanos, 1976–1986. In
Chicano Politics and Society in the Late Twentieth Century, ed. David Montejano,
201–33. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Vasconselos, José. 1948. La Raza Cósmica. Mexico D.F.: Espasa Calpe, S.A.
Viramontes, Helena María. 1985. The Moths and Other Stories. Houston: Arte
Público Press.
Wei, William. 1993. The Asian American Movement. Philadelphia: Temple University
Press.
Wong, Sau-Ling. 1995. Denationalization Reconsidered: Asian American Cultural
Criticism at a Theoretical Crossroads. Amerasia Journal 21, nos. 1–2: 11–32.
With Bertolt Brecht and the
Aztecs Toward an Imagined
Transnation: A Literary
Case Study
Karin Ikas
T
he turn of the twenty-first century is characterized, among other
things, by an emergence of nontraditional group configurations
associated with multiplicity, transnational as well as transcultural clusters
and networks, and mostly shaped by the challenging, dismantling, and
remaking of public identities, such as Ulf Hannerz’s notion of the “global
ecumene.”1 All this piles on the pressure upon modern nation-states whose
traditional demarcations and boundaries these formations transcend.2
As Saskia Sassen writes in her evocatively entitled essay “When National
Territory is Home to the Global: Old Borders to Novel Borderings,” “the
changes under way are shifting the meaning of borders, even when the
actual geographic lines that demarcate territories have not been altered”
(2005, 523). These changes come to pass in many countries worldwide.
Yet especially those countries bear a particular sociological and culturalscientific relevance in which cultural heterogeneity has developed such an
explosive force that it might even thwart the idea of national identity and
lead to separatism or at least the formulation of challenging counternarratives of collective identity that put the nation-state into a crisis.
The United States of America is such a country. Latest figures and statistics show that we can certainly speak of a latinization of the United States in
the third millennium as of the over 296.4 million people who resided in the
United States as of July 1, 2005, more than 14.4 percent are Hispanics.3 This
9
KARIN IKAS
makes people of Hispanic origin, also called U.S. Latinos/as, which, in turn,
acts as an umbrella term for all the numerous Hispanic subgroups in the
United States and of which Mexican Americans make up the by far biggest
subgroup (65 percent), the largest ethnic/race minority in the United States
and one that continues to be significantly on the rise. Latest population estimates expect the projected Hispanic population of the United States as of July
1, 2050, to be about 102.6 million; in other words, U.S. Latinos/as would constitute about 24 percent of the nation’s total population on that date. Given
all these striking numbers, it is little surprising to find that today, more than
a decade after America had observed the quincentennial commemoration
of the encounter between the Old and the New Worlds, also known as the
Discovery of America, its so-called dominating political, economic, and intellectual elite has made a new discovery: The Coming of Mexifornia. If Victor
David Hanson is right, “Mexifornia”—a state in the making that is “not
quite Mexico and not quite America either” (2007)—is currently emerging
within the geopolitical borders of the United States. Right now, Mexifornia
is most likely equated with America’s most populated state, California, where
Hispanics make up more than a third of the population today (approx. 12.4
million Hispanics). Yet, for Hanson as well as Samuel Huntington, the author
of the highly criticized and much debated Who Are We? America’s Great
Debate (2004), California and other states in the U.S. Southwest bordering
Mexico are not the only ones that are currently on the verge of transforming
into a primarily Spanish-speaking Mexifornia; the United States as a whole
may be following the trend. They put forward that skyrocketing (un)documented Mexican and Latino/a immigration rates and an increasing failure
of the dominant elite’s intellectuals to integrate the subjugated groups of the
U.S.-Latino/a and Hispanic people into mainstream America by instilling the
traditional U.S.-American notion of national identity into them efficiently
has already produced a social and civic debacle in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands that is about to swamp the whole nation. Briefly put, Mexiamerica or
Mexamerica as the United States’ new state of becoming is just around the
corner because a longtime constraint for minority people is not only gaining
a numerical superiority but also finding the vigor and strength to formulate a
counternarrative of nation that casts a shadow over the traditional self-image
of the U.S. nation.
An important issue that gains prominence here is the question of segregation. More precisely, does this rapidly growing group of U.S. Latino/as in
general and of Mexican Americans, respectively Chicano/as in particular,
follow in the footsteps of their forefathers, the rather militant Chicano
activists of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s and 1970s, and also
call for a separate nation, the so-called nation of Aztlán, as Rodolfo ‘Corky’
Gonzales and others did at the First National Chicano Liberation Youth
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159
Conference in Denver in 1969 where El Plan Espiritual de Aztlán was passed
(see McWilliams and Meier; Alford 1973)? Well, not really. This is because
hardly any Mexican American today truly believes in the realization of
a manifesto that calls for expelling Anglo-Americans and for forming
Aztlán as a separate and autonomous though primarily patriarchal and
heterosexual Chicano nation north of the Rio Grande. Rather than being a
battle cry to violence and segregation, Aztlán is nowadays generally understood as a spiritual vision of a desired new society of mixed-race people.
Moreover, it is a symbol of cultural pride and an inspiration that keeps
many Chicano/as going to gain justice and equality for their own people
after their homeland had been seized by the United States in the mid 1850s
(De Leon and Del Castillo 2006).
In contemporary discourse, arts, and literature, all this is usually depicted
in two ways. Firstly, the space adjoining the U.S.-Mexico border is perceived
as a danger zone and this affects both dominant ethnic groups residing
here: (il)legal Mexican American (im)migrants for whom the Dialectics of
Difference (Saldívar 1990) does not give rise to assimilation, synthesis, and
resolution but to conflicts; and Anglo-Americans who feel increasingly
threatened by their sway of power coupled with the never-ending influx of
Spanish-speaking Latino/a immigrants and the subsequent transformation of
the U.S.-Mexican border region into what they suspiciously call Mexifornia,
as has been illustrated above. Secondly, and most interestingly though, the
border is increasingly perceived as a hybrid site of mobile crossings (Bandau
and Priewe 2006) and cross-fertilizations where a complex process of
inter- and transcultural relations comes to pass (cf. Ikas and Wagner 2009;
Oliver-Rotger 2003; Kaup 2001; Lomelí and Ikas 2000). Borrowing Mary
Louise Pratt’s notion of the “contact zone” (1992, 4), José David Saldívar, for
instance, perceives the two-thousand-mile-long border between the United
States and Mexico as a paradigm for a “Transfrontera contact zone” (1997, 13).
For him this means a “social space of subaltern encounters, the Janus-faced
border line in which peoples geopolitically forced to separate themselves now
negotiate with one another and manufacture new relations, hybrid cultures,
and multiple-voiced aesthetics” (13–14). Even more pointedly than José
David Saldívar, Bill Ashcroft acknowledges the U.S.-Mexican borderlands as
a case in point for an alternative space where the communication between
cultures and the negotiation of identities assumes new dimensions and what
he recently conceptualized in theory as a “Chicano transnation” and in a
more general frame as a “transnation.” The latter he explains as follows:
TOWARD AN IMAGINED TRANSNATION
By the term “transnation” I mean something more than “the international,”
or the “transnational,” terms that might be conceived as denoting a relation of a crossing between states. Transnation is the fluid, metaphorically
160
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The transnation, then, is a metaphor for an unconventional or rather other
space that is emerging, once subjects characterized by in-betweenness negotiate and transgress manifold boundaries, especially between self and other
as well as real sites and utopias, which, for Ashcroft are “placeless places
strongly imbued with the idea of the sacred.” Obviously, the concept is not
fixated on a real site or object in a political space but it is an imaginary
construct. It emerges in multicultural and heterogeneous discourses as an
empowered “way of talking about subjects in their ordinary lives, subjects
who live in-between the categories by which subjectivity is normally constituted.” Although the term transnation does not particularly connote a real
political space as such, it has a strong political and postcolonial momentum
nevertheless. Ashcroft sums it up as follows: “If we think of the transnation
as an unbounded site, a “smooth space” but a real site, a site of extension
rather than enclosure, we can see how disruptive its potential may be to
state structures and its socially designated sites” (in this collection).
To what extent all this is enacted in The Hungry Woman: The Mexican
Medea (2001), Chicana lesbian playwright Cherríe Moraga’s iconoclastic
play about identity construction in the U.S.-Mexican borderlands, is the
subject of the following analytical section. Here I will examine the way in
which Moraga applies strategies from Bertold Brecht’s epic theatre and
integrates elements from Aztec and European mythology to transgress
a plethora of borders in an endeavor to actively codesign and negotiate
a new conception of in-betweenness that might be comparable to Bill
Ashcroft’s theoretical concept of the transnation as a performed possibility
as well as a fluid and unbound site.
1. Cherríe Moraga’s In-Betweenness and the Struggle
for Meaning in the Borderlands
Cherríe Moraga is an internationally acclaimed and multiply awarded
Mexican American lesbian playwright, poet, essayist, political activist, and
teacher. Born in Los Angeles in 1952 to an Anglo father and a secondgeneration Mexican mother, she became a central figure in women-of-color,
feminism, lesbian, Chicana, and American literature when she started publishing her work in the 1980s. Increasingly, her multiethnic heritage, her
lesbianism, and her political activism became a driving force for her writing, which is intensely personal, eloquently honest, and highly politicized.
Repeatedly in her personal accounts (cf. This Bridge Called My Back 1983)
and her semiautobiographical writings like The Last Generation (1993) and
migrating outside of the state that begins within the nation. (in this collection; emphasis original)
161
Waiting in the Wings (1997), she points at the various forms of discrimination that she experienced throughout the first three decades of her life and
that made her become a writer. In short, in her formative years, she was either
too white to be accepted by her Mexican mother’s ethnic group, too brown
to fully belong to her Anglo father’s ethnic community, too unwomanly a
woman as a lesbian and, after becoming a queer mother of a heterosexual
son, too much a mother and hence un-homosexually woman to be a real
lesbian. To this very day, her in-betweenness, or rather the fact that neither
one of the conventional single “categories of identity” in itself could ever
suffice to capture her distinctive self, is stimulating, in Moraga’s own words,
an insatiable “artist’s hunger to create” within her (1997, 19, 22). A most significant artistic outlet for her is playwriting, whereby for her the stage is not
primarily an arena of lighthearted entertainment but it serves a didactic and
world improvement purpose. In an interview she describes this as follows:
[F]or me writing theatre is somehow a bit like writing a novel. The characters are talking to you, and you have to listen to them. If you try to
superimpose your ideology of that time, the work gets very flat. So I never
am concerned about how the audience is going to respond. I never censor
anything based on who the audience is. I write for my ideal audience that
is probably made up of people who are not homophobic, not racist, people
who are open-minded. So if you assume your audience is open-minded, and
you write well and with enough depth, then whoever is in the audience—
white person, person of color, whatever—will be able to see the other-maybe
for the first time in their life-just as humans.
(Ikas 2002, 162–163)
To achieve this effect and at the same time remind the spectator in the
audience that her plays are just a representation of reality and not reality
itself, Moraga often employs elements from the epic theatre outlined by
Bertolt Brecht in his Little Organum for the Theater (1948/1951; cf. Brecht
1938/1953; Brecht 1957/1964). These techniques adopted from the epic
theatre to “force the spectators to look at the play’s situations from an
angle that they necessarily became subject to its criticism” (Brecht 1964,
121) consist of unnatural stage lighting, exaggerated costumes and masks,
songs, a chorus, and fictional representations and tellings of semihistorical
as well as mythical archetypes and events. Implementing her idea of myth
as “an opening into the past, told in character and image, that can provide
a kind of road map to our future” (Moraga 2001b, IX–X), Moraga recovers
these myths, yet presents them not in pure but rather mixed respectively
hybrid forms in a milieu of in-betweenness on the stage where a new
notion of borderlands identity is then performed. All this can be seen well
KARIN IKAS
in Moraga’s challenging play The Hungry Woman: The Mexican Medea
where this in-betweenness is performed through a multiplicity of characters and images that carry several concurrent meanings, echoing with various cultures, myths, and identifications. If Moraga moves thereby toward
Bill Ashcroft’s projected transnation in the end is one of the subjects to be
answered in the course of the following analytical section.
2. The Hungry Woman: The Mexican Medea
Cherríe Moraga’s “The Hungry Woman: The Mexican Medea” was first
performed at the Border Festival at The Magic Theatre of San Francisco
in December 2000 and published a year later in Moraga’s third volume
of plays The Hungry Woman. The rather apocalyptic play is set in a postrevolutionary space somewhere in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. It is rich
in contrast and integrates, besides English and Spanish code switching,
numerous indigenous spiritual practices in the altogether two acts and
eighteen scenes that make up the play. More precisely, Moraga draws from
the Greek Medea, the Aztec creation myth of The Hungry Woman, and
turns to pre-Columbian Aztec deities from Mesoamerican mythology, all
of which she enhances with a critique of Chicano nationalism and contemporary political tensions to portray the protagonist Medea as a darkskinned exiled woman, who was once the wife of the Mexican macho man
Jason and a mother of their son Chac-Mool, and now, after her coming out
as a lesbian, appears to be a woman gone mad between her longing for her
lesbian lover Luna and for a kind of indigenous nation that is denied her
and that makes her increasingly move toward a rather utopian notion of
in-betweenness in her imagination. The most striking epic theatrical element that Moraga uses in the play is a chorus of four Chihuatateos, who
are according to Aztec mythology female incarnations of the divine spirit
thought to transport the soul of women lost in childbirth to the sun and
who accompany Medea throughout the play through their dances.
Already in the play’s opening scene, Moraga leaves no doubt that Medea is
an outsider and victim of asymmetrical power relations and multiple forms
of betrayals. All these came about during a series of revolutions that resulted
from ethnic hatred and economic turmoil and that eventually divided the
U.S. nation-state into a rather disparate ensemble of four imagined states,
namely Aztlán, Gringolandia, Phoenix, also known as Tamoanchán, and
a mythical realm inhabited by a spirit chorus of Aztec warrior women.
Although most people “look lousy in” this increasingly disparate, crazy, and
ominous world, Medea’s position is particularly problematic: as an indígena
Mexicana Medea she would have had the “blood quantum” required for
citizenship in Aztlán (Moraga 2001a, 72) and as a wife of a highly-respected
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163
Chicano leader also the family status requirements to be a proper woman
in this Mechicano country. Nonetheless, her eventual outing as a brown
activist lesbian lover and mother, whereby she conducts a serious breach
of the prescribed etiquette, puts her into exile. Her exile is a lunatic asylum
in an in-between country also known as “‘Tamoanchán,’ which means ‘we
seek our home’” (Moraga 2001a, 24). It is something like a “gypsy ghetto”
place where “the seeking itself became home,” “[after] los homos became
peregrinos . . . como nomads, just like our Aztec ancestors a thousand years
ago” (24; cf. conversation between Savannah, one of Medea’s warden nurses
who also acts as the Aztec mythic character Mama Sal, and Medea’s son
Chac-Mool). For Moraga, the link between mythical transformation, liberation, and identity formation is seminal. It is the trigger to finally open an
alternative space that goes beyond the numerous confinements that mark
the postrevolutionary states within her imagined borderlands. We can see
this in scene eight when Luna, Medea’s lesbian lover, explicitly refers to the
Hungry Woman creation myth as follows:
Creation Myth. In the place where the spirits live, there was once a woman
who cried constantly for food. She had mouths everywhere. In her wrists,
elbows, ankles, knees . . . And every mouth was hungry y bien gritona. To
comfort la pobre, the spirits flew down and began to make grass and flowers
from the dirt-brown of her skin. From her greñas, they made forests. From
those ojos negros, pools and springs. And from the slopes of her shoulders
and seños, they made mountains y valles. At last she will be satisfied, they
thought. Pero, just like before, her mouths were everywhere, biting and moaning . . . opening and snapping shut. They would never be filled. Sometimes por
la noche, when the wind blows, you can hear her crying for food.
(Moraga 2001a, 44–45)
This passage, from which Moraga draws on John Bierhorst’s critical account
of The Hungry Woman: Myths and Legends of the Aztecs (1984), clearly
shows that a borderlands spatiality cannot be considered apart from a performance of an in-betweenness, which, in turn is triggered off by desire and
shaped by memory. The following scene serves as an excellent example:
MEDEA: I do miss my Luna.
NURSE: Why don’t you tell her that when you see her? You never talk to her.
MEDEA: No. I only want to be an Indian, a Woman, an Animal in the Divine
Ecosystem. The jaguar, the bear, the eagle.
...
LUNA: Medea hid from the light. She always slept in the shadows, the windowless side of the bed, the shades drawn day or night. She slept with ear
plugs, blindfolds.
KARIN IKAS
MEDEA: I think it’s the alcohol that sucks out all your juices, leaves you dry
and black-eyed . . . The god’s downfall and my own.
...
NURSE: What’s to know?
MEDEA: During the day when Jason was at work, I would lay my head
down on the pillow . . . I could hear Chac-Mool outside talking the
stonemason. It was paradise.
NURSE: The stonemason?
MEDEA: Yes. The woman, the migrant worker my husband Jasón hired to
put in the garden patio . . .
[LUNA and CHAC-MOOL appear in MEDEA’s memory]
LUNA: You should plant corn.
CHAC-MOOL: My mom didn’t say nothing about no corn.
LUNA: What’s a garden without corn?
CHAC-MOOL: She’s gonna plant medicine.
LUNA: Your mom makes medicine?
CHAC-MOOL: Yeah, she learned from my Bisabuela.
LUNA: Plant corn. A single corn plant can produce enough grain to feed a
person for a day.
MEDEA: And the stonemason’s voice entered me like medicine. Medicine
for my brokenness.
(Moraga 2001a, 12–13)
Here the ancient knowledge of the Bisabuela, who is Medea’s Spanish
named grandmother, and the stonemason, who is the migrant laborer
in the Borderlands, is deployed to cultivate, in a metaphorical sense,
the garden at the edges of contact and carry out the cultural work of
in-betweenness in the borderlands. To pull out the weeds of neocolonial power relations, assimilative technologies, and notorious claims to
authenticity is once again the most tedious and difficult part of the job
as Jasón’s behavior illustrates. Earlier in the play we have learnt that his
problems of life at the borders emerge from the fact that he lacks “the
blood quantum” (Moraga 2001a, 72) requested for citizenship in the new
Chicano/a country of Aztlán after it had been reestablished along the lines
of a presumed indigenous authenticity. And, what is even more, Jasón also
lacks the insights and sensibility to utilize his resources and cross into an
alternative space attuned to hybridity “from which something begins its
presencing” instead (Bhabha 2004, 1). Without the ability to recognize
the potential of his and other people’s in-betweenness, he is practically
living life like a blind man who careens toward an existence where his
only possibility to satisfy his recurrent need for power is to participate in
what has always occurred in hierarchically structured societies all along:
to kick at those perceived as weaker and more disadvantaged members
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165
of society in order to seize a share of power. This is evoked in the scene
quoted above when Jasón pushes the colored female stonemason back
into her postcolonial former status quo by recognizing her first and foremost as a subjugated brown migrant woman laborer employed to do the
dirty manual work.
The themes of postcoloniality, transgression, and mythical transformation are underscored in the final scenes of the play where the stories
of Medea, the Hungry Woman, and the Cihuatateo intersect with the
Mesoamerican rite of making sacrifices (Miller and Taube 1997; LeónPortillo 1990) and the Christian devotional theme of “Our Lady of Sorrows,”
also known as the pieta motif. The latter found its most famous artistic
expression in Michelangelo’s marble Pietà sculpture (1499) in St. Peter’s
Basilica in Rome. The critical stage is reached here when Medea, who
remains very much caught up in the web of intracultural oppressions
based on gender and sexuality in the final analysis, kills her son Chac-Mool
right before his time of puberty begins. With this infanticide, she literally
goes beyond good and evil in her endeavor to save the people residing
in the U.S.-Mexican borderlands from what she pictures as the dawning
continuation of a primarily unilateral, patriarchal, and homophobic era.
Interestingly enough, however, this does not give rise to an instant of
triumph over the presumed effacement of an antagonistic system. Rather,
it brings about a moment of extraordinary devotion and lamentation for
which Moraga employs the pieta motif in the following way:
He [=CHAC-MOOL] passes out. It is a pieta image, MEDEA holding him
limp within her arms. Then, with much effort, she tries to drag CHAC-MOOL’s
body into the small field of corn. She is unable to. The CIHUATATEO enter,
dressed in the traditional Aztec. They lift CHAC-MOOL and take him into the
center of the field. Meanwhile, piling them into a mound higher and higher.
She becomes frenzied, a frightening image, her white nightgown flowing in
the sudden wind. The pile of blue corn stalks have formed a kind of altar. The
CIHUATATEO heave CHAC-MOOL’s body on top of it.
(Moraga 2001a, 91)
Apparently, this is very much designed along the lines of the ancient
Aztecs’ belief that welfare and survival of humankind depends first of all
on the offering of blood to the divine deity. Nonetheless, with the explicit
reference to the pieta and the iconoclastic transformation of it to a rather
profane lesbian and brown-colored mother and defeated warrior gestalt
that supports the body of the indigenous-named messiah-son Chac-Mool
just shortly before the divine and noble Cihuatateo take over, the scene
quickly turns from the original act and emotion of great love and loss
166
KARIN IKAS
MEDEA: Why have you come here?
CHAC-MOOL: To take you away.
MEDEA: Away . . . where?
CHAC-MOOL: Home.
MEDEA: Home.
...
MEDEA: How will I get there?
CHAC-MOOL: I am taking you.
[He leads her by the hand back to the bed. He holds a handful of powdered
herbs and puts them into a small paper cup of water.]
MEDEA: Mijo?
CHAC-MOOL: Here, drink this. It’ll help you sleep.
[CHAC-MOOL holds MEDEA’s head while she drinks. She is instantly
drowsy. CHAC-MOOL gathers her into his arms as she falls into a deep sleep.
It is a piety image.
The lights gradually fade. Only the shimmering moon remains, and the
figure of the four CIHUATATEO dancing silently in its light.]
End of Play
(Moraga 2001a, 98–99).
According to Christian beliefs, many of the messianic prophecies of the
Old Testament were fulfilled in the mission, death, and resurrection of
Christ, the one and only savior, who repeatedly referred to himself in the
New Testament as “Son of Man” (cf. Mark 14:61b–62; Luke 22:66–70) and
will therefore return to make the rest of the messianic prophecy come true
on doomsday. In the above-quoted epilogue, this role of the messiah is, as
expected, also taken over by the son, namely Chac-Mool. More surprising
in this context, however, is the son’s pre-Columbian name Chac-Mool as it
refers to a Mesoamerican religious character that is more used to offering
human sacrifices to the gods than being sacrificed himself. Yet, a closer look
at this prehistoric Chac-Mool reveals that he was not only involved in the
Mesoamerican religious practices of human sacrifices but also perceived as
an intermediary between human beings and the Gods of rain, water, and
fertility in a more general sense (Lawrence 2001; Miller 1985; Graulich
1984). And this surely is the connecting line to Jesus, the Christian God’s
son who, as Son of Man, is a mediator between the divine and the earthly
as well. Hence, Moraga’s Chac-Mool incarnate holds especially two offices
together with a revering fear of a divine act of control into a transcultural
and transnational field of redemption and transgression. In the play’s
final tableau this line of thought is fully developed when Moraga has the
Christian concept of the messiah step in so that a resurrected Chac-Mool
can return to the scene and act in the following way:
167
in these final scenes: he is an avenging angel and a savior. After his miraculous resurrection, he murders his own mother Medea in the same manner
that he had been murdered by her before: death by poisoning. Through
this matricide, the former infanticide is avenged. Moreover, through her
physical death Medea is redeemed from any form of eternal sin that she
and others have inscribed on her body during her lonesome wandering
through the postrevolutionary borderlands sites. The apparent replacement of the Christian notion of redemptive sacrifice, which centers upon
the belief that Jesus died an innocent death to redeem mankind from all
sins, with the Mesoamerican concept of human expiatory sacrifice hints
at the implications for affirming the indigenous and migratory people’s
presence in the contemporary U.S.-Mexican borderlands: the core of the
debate here is that non-Western religious concepts, myths, and cultural
traditions infiltrate the Western ones and transform the dominant system
from within through dissemination, yet eventually also move beyond
cultural and national restraints toward a new possibility of being where
the spiritual, even sacred, intermingle with the secular, profane, and political. All of this is couched in the final tableau’s iconoclastic depiction of a
reversed and multiple-twisted pieta motif. Moraga’s second pieta composition consists of the messiah-like messenger-son and matricide Chac-Mool,
who is mourning over his dead lesbian mother and infanticide Medea,
whose spirit is already on the move to an interstitial space. On this journey
to a home beyond the confinements of the real world, her spirit is accompanied by the four Cihuatateos dancing silently in the moon’s light. With
this adumbration of a space floating in-between this world and the other
where people living in-between culturally and ethnically defined dualisms
can betake themselves to at last, Moraga’s play comes to a close.
Conclusion
As we have seen from all the aspects examined above, thanks to The Hungry
Woman: The Mexican Medea, Cherríe Moraga broadens the issue of Mexican
American identity (re-)construction to an imagined transnational, transmythical, and a spiritual one. She uses the place of the lunatic asylum as a
metaphor for the borderlands and explains—in an iconoclastic dramatic
move—why neither Mexifornia nor Aztlán can ever be the longed-for
refuge or haven for the people residing in borderlands. It is because both
imaginary spatial concepts do not help to initiate an innovative and positive
process of negotiating an in-betweenness of identity that suffices the purposes of multiethnic residents in the borderlands of the third millennium,
of which the U.S.-Mexican border region provide one striking example.
What is needed instead in the latter context is an unsettling of the dominant
KARIN IKAS
Anglo-American national discourse as well as of the reactionary nativist
Chicano pathos of a new Aztlán that appears to be nothing else but the old
wine of an asymmetrically structured patriarchal system in the new bottle
of a pseudo-authentic and blood-rooted Chicano nation. While the lack of
tolerance for sexual diversity and the myopic vision of many fundamentalist groups on either side—the Euro-American and the Mexican American
one—is largely held responsible for the chaos and troubled life in her projected postrevolutionary future of the U.S.-Mexican borderlands where the
colored, the homosexual, and the female migrant others are pushed to the
margins, it is exactly the exiled position from where a development toward
a new notion of in-betweenness emerges. In exile, Moraga’s brown-colored
lesbian Chicana heroine mother gets down to construct an alternative and
rather mythopoeic narrative of the U.S.-Mexican borderlands “that is new,
neither the one nor the other but something else besides, which contests
the terms and territories of both” (Bhabha 1994, 28). In-betweenness is
acknowledged as the most viable subject position from which to negotiate
and represent a condition of transcultural or rather transmythical mobility
here, of people on the move within but also beyond the borderlands and the
nation-states. In other words, people, who, as Homi Bhabha aptly notes, “will
not be contained within the Heim of the national culture and its unisonant
discourse, but are themselves the marks of a shifting boundary that alienates
the frontiers of the modern nation” (1994, 164). Moreover, as we have seen,
Moraga moves beyond Bhabha’s proclaimed alienating of the frontiers of the
nation-state in that she suggests a disruption of these boundaries. Here she
approaches Bill Ashcroft’s notion of transnation. Like in Ashcroft’s critical
conception for Moraga in her stage performance of a new identity construction of in-betweenness in The Hungry Woman: The Mexican Medea “exile
begins within the nation” or rather the nations in her projected postrevolutionary borderlands. Yet, it eventually moves as well beyond any political
and geographic margins and zonings to become an unbounded site where
not only a “powerful fusion of the mythic and the political, the sacred and
nation” comes to pass but an imagined futuristic space is thinkable “in which
national and cultural affiliations are superseded, in which binaries of centre
and periphery, national self and other are dissolved” (Ashcroft, in this collection) within and through literature and theatrical performance.
168
Notes
1. Cultural anthropologist Ulf Hannerz, in his Transnational Connections, introduced
the term “global ecumene” to capture the network character of the so-called landscape of modernity, which he views as constituted by interacting and intertwined
transnational connections and cultural relations. For a detailed discussion of
169
Hannerz’s concept and how it can be applied to contemporary literary analysis in
transnational and transcultural contexts, see Schulze-Engler 2000.
2. See, for instance, Shih and Lionnet 2005; Smith 2003; Pries 2001; McIntyreMillis 2000. For the ongoing debate about local and global transcultural communities, see also the biannual journal Moving Worlds: A Journal of Transcultural
Writings. http://www.movingworlds.net/.
3. This and other cited data are taken from the latest U.S. Census survey findings.
The estimate quoted here does not include the 3.9 million residents of the dominion of Puerto Rico. See http://www.census.gov/Press-Release/www/releases/.
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Saldívar, Ramón. 1990. Chicano Narrative: The Dialectics of Difference. Madison:
University of Wisconsin Press.
Shi, Shu-mei, and Françoise Lionnet, eds. 2005. Transnationalism. Durham: Duke
University Press.
Smith, Michael Peter. 2003. Transnationalism, the state and the extraterritorial
citizen. Politics and Society 31.4: 467–501.
Schulze-Engler, Frank. 2000. Literature in the Global Ecumene of Modernity:
Amitav Ghosh’s The Circle of Reason and In an Antique Land. In English
Literatures in International Contexts, ed. Heinz Antor and Klaus Stierstorfer,
373–396. Heidelberg: Winter.
170
Travel, Autoethnography, and
Oppositional Consciousness in
Juan Felipe Herrera’s
Mayan Drifter
Maria Antònia Oliver-Rotger
I use the word “Chicano” with irony too. Here I claim it again; it is a halfstep between Ladino1 and Indian, a jump start from apathy into commitment.
(Juan Felipe Herrera, Mayan Drifter).
T
he prolific poet, essayist, and dramatist Juan Felipe Herrera belongs
to a generation of writers who came of age during or in the aftermath
of Civil Rights Chicano activism (late 1960s and early 1970s) and adopted
an indigenista (indigenist) aesthetics as a strategy of cultural affirmation
and opposition to the Anglo mainstream. Herrera straddles generations in
that, although the indigenous continues to be a major concern in his work,
he has gradually grown out of the claim of a Chicano identity linked to an
indigenous past and has become critical with the romantic emphasis on
pre-Columbian roots of previous movimiento (Chicano movement) days.
He is now one of the main voices of a “post-movement” literature produced
during and after the 1980s that does not hold up cultural nationalism and
often focuses on the place of Mexican Americans in a trans-American
context. These authors continue to claim the label “Chicano” as an act of
commitment to the struggle for social justice and understand the present,
the past, and the future of Mexican Americans and Latinos in the United
States in the wider frameworks of U.S.-Mexican relations and U.S.-Latin
10
MARIA ANTÒNIA OLIVER-ROTGER
American relations.2 The limited scholarly work on Herrera’s writings may
be due to his unconventional approach to chicanismo (chicano nationalism) or perhaps to the unconventional elements of his poetics and artistic
practice outlined by Lauro Flores: the difficulty to catalog him as an artist;
the syncretism of artistic forms; the constant questioning of the limits
imposed by literary classification; and the frequent mixture in his works
of the strange and the everyday, the primitive and the modern, and the
mythical and the real (Flores 1990, 172–179).3
The title of the work, Mayan Drifter, suggests crucial elements in
Herrera’s poetics, appealing, on the one hand, to place-based communities
and historical origins, and, on the other, to a constant rootless wandering.
Besides evoking a physical journey, the title bespeaks a metaphysical state
of restlessness, as Herrera is involved in the exploration of the innerborderlands territory of his Mexican American identity. The occasion
for this book is Herrera’s second journey to the Mexican border region
of Chiapas in 1993. Herrera’s first encounter with Mexican culture took
place in the 1970s and began as a cultural, anthropological investigation
into the “way of life” of his ancestors. Eventually, it became a “radical life
connection” with “the bastard daughters and sons unclaimed by official
Mexico” (Herrera 1997, 27). Written after a second journey to the region to
“reunite with my other family” (27), Mayan Drifter is a “spiritual practice
where I meditate upon my being and place in the world in relationship to
the people sharing the same space” (5, my emphasis). Herrera engages in
a conversation about America that is about “the complex of my identities
as Chicano, Latino, mestizo, Indian, American” (13), the “dark-skinned
powerlessness in the frayed edges of America” (14), the “multiple fissures
of America” (15), and a Mexico “broken and splintered by complex socioeconomic disparities and interventions” (17). Since the Zapatista uprising
in Mexico breaks out as Herrera is writing his travelogue,4 the work offers
retrospection or reflection on how the interaction of local and global
realities may have spurred a new revolutionary consciousness across the
Americas.
Following his customary tendency outlined by Flores whereby “todo se
mezcla y se entreteje [Everything is mixed and intertwined]” (1990, 173),
Herrera takes advantage of a genre that allows for heterogeneity to blend
together travel anecdote, prose poem, personal testimonial commentary,
introspection, ethnographic description, and sociological analysis5 in an
effort to represent the effect of global politics in the Americas and the role
of the Chicano writer in this context. Considering that the travelogue has
been an instrumental genre in the consolidation of empire, the binary
Western self/non-Western other upon which the colonial enterprise was
based,6 in this essay I want to address the way in which Mayan Drifter
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173
inscribes colonialism while it also resists an entirely colonial vision through
a self-reflexive narrative voice aware of his dual fragmented heritage from
the colonizer and the colonized. This voice shows a utopian longing for
wholeness, but is confronted with the disjointed remnants of modern
history. As the narrator uncovers a history of unequal development and
disadvantage in which he is ambivalently involved, he engages in the complexity of self-other dynamics both at the rhetorical and historical levels,
thus foregrounding his ethical, ideological position, and voicing a sense of
answerability to others (Lisle 2006, 263–265).
1. Travel Writing, Colonial Discourse, and the Ethics of Difference
In her essay titled The Global Politics of Contemporary Travel Writing,
Debbie Lisle analyzes the revitalization of travel writing in global times in
terms of the tension between two coexisting strategies. On the one hand,
there is a continuation of a “colonial tradition,” which reproduces the
viewpoint of a privileged Western traveler who assumes the superiority of
his cultures and values and who bolsters this superiority by judging and
labeling the so-called less-civilized areas of the world. Lisle contends that
although there is a tendency to mimic the old colonialist style of writing,
in the present-day context of globalization, the simple logic of dominance/
subordination produces anxieties and insecurities in travel writers. Thus,
the travel writer’s colonial heritage is resisted through the simultaneous
strategy that Lisle calls the “cosmopolitan vision.” Through this vision, contemporary travel writing creates a distance from the ideology of empire and
presents the encounters with other peoples and cultures in terms of mutual
understanding, recognition of difference, and hope in the emancipatory
possibilities of a global community. Lisle finds that most contemporary
travel writing displays a liberal empathy for the social struggles of the dispossessed. Her study focuses on the symbiotic relationship between these
two strategies and explores the extent to which the values of empathy and
equality of the cosmopolitan vision coexist with a colonial mentality and
the extent to which they can actually foster alternative views that are not
tainted by colonial assumptions of Western superiority (Lisle 2006, 5–6).
Together with Lisle, previous contributions to the field of travel writing,
such as those by Patrick Holland and Graham Huggan, Steve Clark, and
Casey Blanton, have looked into the ways in which travelogues or travel
books resist the simple exercise of imperial power by examining the textual
mechanisms that expose the vulnerability of the usually masculine speaker,
foreground his conditioning as a member of a Western culture, and articulate “a more benign ethics of alterity” (Clark 1999, 4). In this essay I want to
explore the ethics of alterity or “ethics of difference” (Lisle 2006, 260) in the
TRAVEL, AUTOETHNOGRAPHY, & OPPOSITIONAL CONSCIOUSNESS
light of the textual inscription of a diasporic, differential, oppositional consciousness shaped by displacement and colonization. This consciousness or
mode of perception—which critics have respectively termed “borderlands”
or “mestiza” consciousness (Anzaldúa 1987), “border thinking” (Mignolo
2003), “postcolonial mestizaje” (Pérez-Torres 2000), and “oppositional consciousness” (Sandoval 2000)—transmits resistance to notions of national
belonging, articulates the alienation of modernity, and seeks to find a
place within a broad postcolonial, transnational history. Chela Sandoval
explains the origins of this consciousness as follows: “Under conditions of
colonialization, poverty, racism, gender or sexual subordination, dominated
populations are often held away from the comforts of the dominant ideology or ripped out of legitimized social narratives, in a process of power
that places such constituencies in a very different position from which to
view objects-in-reality than other kinds of citizen-subjects” (2000, 105). My
contention is that Mayan Drifter incorporates this consciousness and offers
an alternative committed perception of history and global politics. In doing
so, this travelogue resists the generic codes of travel writing and interrogates
the epistemological position of the traveler/narrator through the deliberate
engagement with and emphasis on self-other dynamics that Lisle deems
necessary for the transformation of the genre (2006, 263–265).
2. The Political Self-Reflexive Subject
Steve Clark has argued that “the traveler has no inside”: the very status
conferred upon him by the separation from his usual environment and
family turns him into a proleptic heroic being that represents society and
precludes introspection. The “robustness” of the genre of travel writing is
a result of the transfer of previous cultural information onto a witnessing experience with little or no display of personal neurosis (Clark 1999,
13–14). Yet, the concern with otherness that is part of contemporary critical debates as well as the growing interest for life writing have shifted the
critical focus on travel writing as one of the ways of writing the self, as a
“subspecies of autobiography” (17).
Herrera’s text lends itself to such an analysis, for it combines the selfreferential elements of autobiography and the concern with representation
of ethnographic and anthropological critique. Michael Fischer (1986),
James Clifford (1988), and Mary Louise Pratt (1992) have contended
that the texts by minority writers contain a critique of ethnography and
anthropology through reflexivity and metacriticism in that they draw on
the fictional character of representation, fashioning a self that is authorized
to represent its culture but that also shows awareness of the mechanisms
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175
of textual authority. This critique by the autoethnographic voice is in tune
with developments in ethnographic and autobiographical theory over
the last three decades. Ethnographic theory, often under the influence of
methods of literary criticism, has stressed subjective and imaginative elements in the apparently objective documentation of another culture. No
longer an objective form of representation, ethnography, just as literature,
has become a “limited way of seeing the world” that mediates between a
subjective, interpretive discourse and an objective discourse (Quintana
1992, 72). In turn, studies in autobiography have deeply interrogated the
univocality, stability, and coherence of the self, looking instead at its contradictions, discontinuities, and multiple voices.7 A large body of Latino/a
literature consists of hybrid self-referential works, which often involve,
following Charles Tatum’s observation, autocritical reflections and processes of self-understanding.8 Besides being autobiographical, these texts
are autoethnographic in that minoritized subjects dialogue with former
representations of themselves (Pratt 1992, 1–15).
Mayan Drifter is inspired by the largely autoethnographic testimonio of
the Quiché Maya activist and poet Rigoberta Menchú titled I, Rigoberta
Menchú. Recalling the anti-indigenista proclamations9 of Mexican writer
Rosario Castellanos,10 Herrera proposes Menchú as a model of the “new
American writer,” who, far from giving a mystifying view of being Indian,
outlines what for Herrera is the role of the new American writer in the late
twentieth century: “stare back at chaos disaster and death, be fearless in
the face of relentless oppression, learn the languages of the marginalized as
well as of the oppressor, remember to assist in organizing exploited communities, remember to break through assigned borders, always fight and
always forgive—remember the secrets” (Herrera 1997, 9).
In her elaboration on the lack of self-reflexivity in travel writing (chapters 2, 3, and 6 of her book), Lisle looks at how what Derrida has called
the “Law of Genre” (the generic limits between genres, and, in particular,
the distinction between fact and fiction) generally prevents travel narratives from confronting the conditionings and assumptions of the writing
subject in the way that fiction and autobiography do. On the one hand,
the genre has usually claimed objective truthful representation, as opposed
to the imagination of fiction as representational strategies; on the other, it
has consolidated the authority and superiority of the generally masculine
Western subject through his encounter with difference. Mayan Drifter challenges this authority by navigating through dominant and dominated consciousness and discourses as they manifest themselves in the inner realm of
the personal and in the outer realm of politics, economy, and culture. Not
accidentally, the Chicano author begins his book by openly declaring where
he stands in relation to the United States, Mexico, academia, the institution
of anthropology, and the institution of literature. In “American Prelude(s),”
the first chapter of the work, Herrera dedicates his book to “Mexico’s Indian
peoples and all those who want to think about and reimagine America”
(1997, 7). Here, the three main objectives of his book are outlined: “to
rethink America, to rethink myself, to rethink American writing” (8).
This triple socioeconomic, personal, and literary investigation is one
that necessarily has to address complex issues of cultural and historical
representation where language and discourse organize the world according to hierarchies that reflect power dynamics: “I want to tackle concepts
of nation, symbols of ethnicity, practices for cultural knowledge, systems
of literary order, questions of the margin and the center, the border work
between the observer and the observed, between loss and recovery, suffering and liberation, between the language of America and for America”
(Herrera 1997, 8). Herrera’s travelogue is very much in tune with scholarly streams of work that explore how cultural practices inscribe identity,
power, and privilege, but most importantly, the author contends with how
he is involved as a writer, a poet, and an intellectual in the continuity or in
the contestation of those hierarchies: “I cannot question the place of and
for America if I do not question my own position” (7).
As Gayatri Spivak has remarked, no intellectual claiming to generate
revolutionary, resisting, or oppositional writing, can elide how one’s own
writing is affected by the dangerous convergence between the celebration
of diversity by the powers that be, and the vindication of a “differential”
perspective that counters hegemonic technologies of power and representation. As Lisle cogently demonstrates, in contemporary travel writing, this
convergence may result in the cosmopolitan celebration of cultural difference in romantic terms: “others should be valued because they are closer
to the mysteries of nature, spirituality and the universe” (Lisle 2006, 86).
Although Herrera’s text is not exempt from nostalgic romanticization, it
also goes beyond the cosmopolitan vision by probing into several ways in
which the self, travel, and writing are enmeshed in colonial and neocolonial
relations. The writer contends with the difficulty of writing about Indian
America as an intellectual who has swallowed the “master’s conquest
language” (Herrera 1997, 13–17) while he also claims affinities between
distant people affected by the global socioeconomic tensions at Mexico’s
northern and southern borders: between his American family’s migratory displacements and the uprooting of the Lacandón Mayas, between
the death, destitution, and struggle of clandestine migrant workers in the
United States and Mayan Indians in Mexico (4). Yet, he has to admit this
is a “fictive kinship system” (7), for his status as a writer “prospering in
the ganglia of a superpower” (6) and his biases as a “man from El Norte”
distance him from the Lacandón Mayas and make it difficult for him to
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177
3. Drifting as the Chicano Poet’s Existential Metaphor
Where other travel writers may have been “notoriously bad at saying why”
(Clark 1999, 14), Herrera is notoriously good at self-explanation. The
Chicano author uses autobiographical discourse to explore his reasons
for traveling and to inquire into elements of his experience that make
him close to and distant from Mexico and America. Alluding to Gloria
Anzaldúa’s well-known autobiographical text, Borderlands/La Frontera
(1987), Herrera uses the concept of the borderlands as a metaphysical category to explain the multiple layers of his Chicano identity and his ethnopoetics (1997, 7). Following other Latino/a testimonial, autobiographical,
and autoethnographic practices,11 the text explicitly alludes to the sources
of enunciation of the narrated self and to the personal, economic, and
political events that have shaped the narrator’s subjectivity, tracing his
migratory, unstable, hybrid identity back to his own family history and to
his privileged position as an intellectual from the United States.
The section “Júarez Gypsies,” included in the ethnographic chapter
“Gathering a Mayan Repertoir,” inquires into his own “metaphysics of restlessness” (Holland and Huggan 2000, 14), and into the life baggage he takes
with him as a Chicano to the Lacandón jungle. As he drives to San Cristóbal,
memories of his parents’ deaths, especially the most recent death of his
mother, are reminders of his loneliness as well as of a pain that he has not yet
come to terms with. Herrera’s physical journey is internalized as a journey
toward “unraveling [his] personal history” and seeking, as an orphan, to connect with other selves (1997, 28). Recalling his parents’ migrant itineraries,
the family’s permanent movement, his father’s absences from home, and his
parents’ deferral of hopes for a better life, Herrera provides an account of his
“politics of location” and “subject position” based on his experience of movement, marginalization, and in-betweenness.12 While his uncle Beto’s radio
program in Juárez, “El Barco de la Ilusión” (“The Ship of Hope”), figures the
possibility of dreams fulfilled through mobility and migration, the Mexican
neighborhood where his family stems from, “El Niño Perdido” (“The lost
child”), figures loss and inner fragmentation. In a characteristic language
that brings together the old and the new, tradition and modernity, Herrera
describes his own cultural struggle in the postmodern age—the “corrido of
the Colonial Culture Extractor” or “the postmodern chicano road warrior . . .
holding on to the Goddess of fracture” (Herrera 1997, 32)—and inserts
hold a “third conversation” with America beyond the “romantic jumble”
or nostalgic longing for the Indian origins of Chicano nationalism, the
patronizing colonialist representation of the Indian of the West, and a
glum invocation of postmodern fracture and disintegration.
his search for home and self in a collective project of resistance including
Chicanos and other colonized subjects.
The wandering or drifting as existential metaphor of the Chicano
writer is only tangentially related to the imaginative site of the nomad or
the migrant as claimed by travel writers like Bruce Chatwin or critics like
Ian Chambers. For the latter, migrancy “calls for a dwelling in language, in
histories, in identities that are constantly subject to mutation. Always in
transit, the promise of a homecoming—completing the story, domesticating the detour—becomes an impossibility” (Chambers 1994, 139). The
escapist metaphors of nomadism and migrancy represent the condition of
the postmodern, cosmopolitan traveler enmeshed in a complex referential
system where national identities and cultural homogeneity are no longer
stable (Holland and Huggan 2000, 166–169). Tim Youngs regrets that this
use of the label “nomad” removes from it “the economic realities of the
existence of those to whom it properly belongs” (1994, 174). Although
Herrera’s work deals with the cultural dilemmas of postmodernity, the
reference to drifting or nomadic travel is much more than a rhetorical representation of global mobility and heterogeneous identities, as it stands for
several cultural, existential, and political predicaments. Herrera partakes in
and is aware of processes of mixture and hybridization in an increasingly
globalized world, but deems it necessary, as an overture to social action
and commitment, to situate the reader in distinct diasporic experiences
with particular histories of colonial, class, gender, and race relations. In his
text, “drifting,” like one of the current critical uses of diaspora, “articulates
both generalized migrancy or nomadism as well as a strenuous call for
particularized histories of specific sites of hybridity” (Kaplan 1996, 139).
Consequently, the poet’s second journey to the Mexican region of Chiapas
in 1993 is a physical, metaphysical, and epistemological journey through
several instances of dislocation, migration, and dispossession brought
about by the multiple and variegated power imbalances of colonization
and globalization. As will be seen, drifting identities, economies, and individuals are shown to differ in the context of those imbalances, for there is
no collapsing of the Mayan peoples’ experience of physical and cultural
displacement and the poet’s existential rootlessness into one single decontextualized metaphor.
178
4. Transnational Coalitions and the Ethics of Alterity
The ethical affiliation with the people in Chiapas is made possible through the
retrieval of memories of the writer’s significant others and the identification
of a “common ground” of subordination and marginalization between the
past experiences of his family and the present conditions of Mayan Indians
179
(Sandoval 2000, 53). Relationality, a characteristic of autobiographical discourse (Smith and Watson 2001, 64–67), is here used to express coalitions
across lines of racial, ethnic, national, or physical difference (Sandoval 2000,
71). The experience of Herrera’s mother and aunts, who worked as maids
in the United States, are mobilized as the writer meditates on how the subservience and solicitous smiles of Mayan and Ladina maids at the hotel and
research center, Na Bolom, encourage the historically and culturally established superior position of the American traveler and tourist:
I recognized their accents, the pleasing voices, the entertaining conversations, the laughter, carefree and jubilant; the nervousness was familiar too . . .
Recognized their waiting, their pauses, waiting for me to inflate myself into an
American, as most visitors do, especially the male residents at Na Bolom . . . ;
and as I “grew” during the brief exchange, they in turn would diminish as the
sí’s sputtered from their mouths.
(Herrera 1997, 64).
A similar moment of recognition of the self in others happens as Herrera
travels by bus through the colonias on La Ruta Maya. The lonely man with
a machete sitting next to him suddenly makes him think of the migrant
past of his father, of his search for a better livelihood for his family.
If private autobiographical details serve as a point of connection, the
author’s public involvement as a Chicano is also crucial to establish transnational linkages between the political and social realities of the dispossessed
of the south and the north in the 1970s and the 1990s. In “Indian Corridos
for Justice” Herrera equates the Mexican deaths in Río Portugal in Chiapas
during a military attack against a movement for labor and human rights to
deaths of migrants crossing the Río Grande into the United States. Herrera
associates the ongoing struggle of Indian communities, aggravated by the
privatization of land in the 1990s, to the 1960s and 1970s U.S. migrant
worker protests under the Zapatista cry for “tierra and libertad.” During
his first 1970 visit to Chiapas to become attuned to indigenous culture and
apply its artistic principles to Chicano writing, he heard of the incident
where police opened fire on Chicano anti–Vietnam War demonstrators.
This event, together with the Indian campesino struggle he witnessed in
San Cristóbal, made it impossible for the writer to relish his “Indio euphoria” (Herrera 1997, 68). As he establishes links between the north and south,
he becomes aware of his own divided loyalties: “[B]etween the squalor
and abuse of Mexican Indians and the onslaughts against working class
mexicanos in California . . . [B]etween my own Amerindian utopias, the
socioeconomic wedges of class between Zinacantecos and Chamulas, and
the cruel sniper work in urban America” (69).
In “Na Bolom: Histories and Fragments” the writer contrasts the
statistics on Mexico’s growth, gross national product, and oil output to
upsetting data about displaced ladinos working in oil development areas,
the devastation of most of the Lacandón jungle found by the founders of
Na Bolom, Chiapas’ families hunger and dire living conditions, and the
lack of sewage and infrastructure in Indian villages (Herrera 1997, 56).
Before the bleak figures, Herrera confesses his impotence—“What was I,
a comfortable Americano going to do with these numbers and tables?”
(58)—and wonders about other missing figures: nonexistent data on
women sexually abused by landowners, worker exploitation, child labor,
and “master-Indian offspring working out their Indian parents’ plantation debts” (58). The official “rhetoric of Indian unity” of the Mexican
contrasts with the resisting, oppositional language of Indian communities
in their protest march before Ladino dominant groups and authorities in
San Cristóbal in 1993; their banners, signs, and flyers—sometimes also
written in English with the hopes their message will reach Anglo tourists
and perhaps will spur some action—contain a language of loss, pain, and
protest that Herrera transcribes and, when necessary, translates for the
monolingual English reader: claims against labor abuse, the privatization
of land, violence, rape, homophobic murders, and unjustified arrests and
incarceration. Here, the writer wonders about the effectiveness of a “united
front,” a single “collective echo” of the voices that result from interconnected power networks (Herrera 1997, 69), a “dissident transnational
coalitional consciousness” made possible by a “a postempire transnational
citizenship” (Sandoval 2000, 79, 174): “East Los, Simojovel, Las Margaritas,
Chiapas, the Southwest, Tzotziles, Chicanos, Tzeltales, Mexicanos, students, campesinos, dogooder Ladinos. Could the symbols mesh? Virgen
de Guadalupe flags, United Farmworkers eagle motifs, Tzotzil corridos,
and Chicano power chants, mexicanos, Ladinos, brown-skin American in
between brown skins” (Herrera 1997, 69).
In the subsequent section, “Red Rebozos for Rigoberta Menchú,” the
author appeals to a resisting transnational citizenship and consciousness
by invoking the Guatemalan activist and writer and connecting her struggle, grief, and resistance with that of the Mayan female collectives protesting around the zócalo for those raped and killed. The protesting women
from the nearby village of Chenalhó, whose tightly braided hair holds
terrible pictures of the attrocities, “were Rigoberta Menchú with crossed
arms and staunch hearts . . . They were the braided spirits of Doña Petrona
Chona, whose body was machete-cut into twenty-five pieces by the bodyguard of a landowner in Guatemala, pieces that Rigoberta Menchú’s father
placed in a basket.
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181
Petrona
shredded
into pieces
(Herrera 1997, 73)
Through the metaphors of braiding and waving, Herrera turns Petrona,
whose story appears in Menchú’s testimonio, I, Rigoberta Menchú, into an
icon of cross-border Indian suffering and resistance:13 “Petrona, in pieces,
came back to us this afternoon . . . Her legs and thighs. Her belly and her
breasts. She was woven back, through stone, through national borders and
border-guard time; she had come back through the valley of machetes,
broken galeras and fincas and was present in this multitude, calling out for
justice” (Herrera 1997, 74).
Before the group of Indian protesters, the writer characteristically wonders about “us,” “the onlookers, the note takers, the accountants, bookkeepers, and anthropological shadows” (Herrera 1997, 74), and describes
himself as a distant observer of the scene, remaining “at the back,” sitting
down and smoking. Finally, he walks up closer as the whole plaza is mourning the dead in tears: “I let my crying take me to their crying and envelop
me in their weeping; this was one thing I could do. It came up without
question or analysis, without notes or reflections; I was singing with my
Indian sisters and brothers, I was singing for the dead and wounded and
for their transformation into fullness and freedom” (75). The last passage
of the chapter, narrated in the second person and present tense, is a deeply
poetic, moving address to the protesting, mourning Indians whose suffering the writer takes in as the ground for an inner spiritual and ideological transformation. The passage, which deserves being quoted at length,
emblematizes what Chela Sandoval, drawing on Roland Barthes’s A Lover’s
Discourse (1978), describes as a “drift” beyond language and words “into a
third differential zone” (Sandoval 2000, 143). The drift requires an escape
from oneself, from “that which is tamed and known,” releasing consciousness from “its grounding in dominant language and narrative to experience the meanings that lie in the zero degree of power,” dissociating oneself
from dominant forms of knowledge, ideology, and power (146–147):
congealed”
I clutch you without language, without a text for my transformation. You are
changing before my eyes, and my skin; you with the same burrs and loud
scarves and scars as my mother, with the same crooked elbow as my father . . .
I would have stayed and remained alone, inside the city bank, inside the
fashion fair prowls of my metropolitan euphorias . . . I would have stayed back
there, in my comfort and in my high-rise grape-picking valley, in California, or
in my open desert floodwater volcanic Midwest stone, in the land of Lincoln,
next door to Dorothy’s flight to Oz; I would have kept all my fine flared writing pens, my self-made quills, and tall proud movimiento [sic] notebooks
and looked elsewhere for my rain. I would have looked elsewhere, somewhere
between fanciful Americanness and brown-skinned oblivion . . . I took a second or two and ran into you, by mistake . . . I receive you without any words;
I am still unformed, I am changing with you as you go to your uncombed
triumph, held up by the women of the villages, to continue to remember that
you continue.
(Herrera 1997, 77)
5. Herrera’s Oppositional Technologies
Herrera’s personalization of the political, his sensitivity and drifting
toward difference, together with the impulse toward a more democratic,
egalitarian society, enable practices of opposition or “technologies” such
as semiotics or sign-reading, deconstruction, and metaideologizing that,
in Chela Sandoval’s words, constitute a “methodology of the oppressed.”
The metanarrative strategies at work in Mayan Drifter decipher and contest the idioms of global neocolonial power, but also demonstrate a postmodern awareness of the textual status of the travel book (Holland and
Huggan 2000, 158), calling attention to writing as an act of violence and
deconstructing the position of the travel writer as a superior, indisputable
authority. These technologies, to which I would add self-irony, call attention to the formal properties of travel writing and establish a connection
between the genre and its complicity with global power.
The (Un)authorized Writer
Very much in the documentary spirit of other travel writings, Mayan
Drifter resorts to the facts necessary for the author’s sociological analysis
and interpretation, but it also makes strong statements about the contingency of knowledge, the subjective involvement in its production, and its
use with different purposes and objectives. Although the book includes
a list of selected readings at the end, they are not cited in the main body
of the text as sources, but rather appropriated by the author for his own
interpretation of events. Hence, his apology in the preface for his personal
use of academic sources. There is here no aspiration to an essential truth,
no claims that the travel writer is telling us the true version of the story.
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183
In other instances, however, Mayan Drifter inevitably inscribes the position of a Western more-knowledgeable, informed subject, a kind of elder
brother to the Mexican. In the section “Kassandra and the Descrambler,”
the travel writer does not for a minute doubt his knowledge and interpretation of the political and economic relation between Mexico and the
United States and assumes the information he has is too complex to be
shared with his Mayan interlocutors.
Nonetheless, the writer’s awareness of his involvement in larger representational structures, essential to his concept of writing, is illustrated
in the second section of the Prelude, “The Third Conversation.” Here
Herrera shifts to third person and narrates the internal debates of a character, Juan, a figuration of the Chicano writer himself. Upon his return
from Chiapas, Juan dwells on the ethics of representation of the native
other, pondering on the kind of language he is to use before he begins an
account of his travels. If, as Lisle puts it, “travel writing is an important
part of the narration of global politics” (2006, 33), Herrera sees himself as
one of the subjects who produce that narration. Third person narration
allows for a detached metareflection on the contingency of the position
of the Chicano travel writer and poet within the global reality. Juan’s
concern for Lacandones is mocked by his partner, Maga, a female voice
that previously appeared in one of his poetic short stories “Para siempre,
Maga” (“For ever, Maga”). In Mayan Drifter, as in the previous work,
Maga is the voice of the poet’s conscience, scornfully underscoring the
championing, well-intentioned concerns of a middle-class Chicano for
the Mexican poor and blatantly exposing his paternalism and his idealized, victimizing notions of the native. Maga says that after this second
trip Juan “[hasn’t] changed” at all: he talks about Mexico in the same
tragic, romantic but really uninvolved and distant tone he used to, as
if to a little, defenseless sparrow he did not really want to save (Herrera
1997, 16). Through this conversation between Maga and Juan, Herrera
addresses one of the main concerns of the book: the inevitable imbrication of the Chicano writer in “imperialist nostalgia”14 as a privileged
Western subject despite his commitment to social justice. Herrera is
thus no different from the well-meaning progressive revolutionary tourists and anthropologists. All of them are tightly woven into a vast web
of corporate, neocolonial global power, in which, as Maga suggests, the
Mexican national revival of the “authentic” native patrimony is involved.
This exercise at self-distancing is a characteristic of the above-mentioned
“postmodern ethnic autobiography” or “autoethnography” as the author
presents himself as an object of ethnographic inquiry, looking at himself
with the detachment of irony and examining his image as fictional and
constituted by structures of authority.
184
Besides rewriting America through silenced voices and facts, Mayan Drifter
brings forward oppositional discourses that read into the mechanisms of
global corporate language and governmental indigenismo.15 Images of the
native Indian frozen into the past are shown to be contemporary versions
of colonialism promoted by “Madrid-Gortary-Zedillo party technocrats”
and the “new class of Mexican billionaire families.” They draw on them to
attract tourism, while at the same time claiming to modernize and develop
southern Mexico economically through a trade agreement that destroys
their way of life: “Note how they kneel at the foot of the temples. ‘Let us
honor our indigenous culture’, they say. They say this the way they say ‘oil,
power and profit’ when they promote NAFTA—with the erotic power fix
of a rapist” (Herrera 1997, 125).
The travelogue offers an elaborate analysis and critique of the workings
of what Barthes would have termed the “mythology” of institutionalized
indigenismo through a decoding method or deconstructive semiotics that
highlights the tight imbrications of former colonialism, Mexican state
nationalism, ethnography, national and international economic interests,
travel, and global tourism. The apparently conservationist yet condescending and rapacious attitudes of the Mexican government toward Indian
peoples are equated to the language used by Mexican and foreign ethnographers, such as the Danish founders of Na Bolom, Frans and Trudy Blom,
in the 1940s. Both silence Indians’ multiple displacements and social subordination through what John Frow calls a “semiotics of nostalgia.” For the
narrator, Na Bolom—the hotel, museum, and research center—becomes
emblematic of the instrumentalization of ethnographic research for the
sake of global and national interests in the tourist industry. Na Bolom
now appeals to its residents’ and visitors’ “ethical or ecological tourism”
(Lisle 2006, 82) and contemporary conservationist nostalgia through a
sham reforestation donation box whose contents are never used with that
purpose. Meanwhile, PEMEX (Petróleos Mexicanos) buys Lacandones’s
conformity with money it “dumps” in the area (Herrera 1997, 37), which
people like K’ayum Ma’ax use to buy televisions, VCRs, satellite dishes,
and water heaters (123–124). Described as a “Mayan museum machine”
(3), a “tourist trap disguised by a politically correct Indianism and facile
environmental platitudes” (54), Na Bolom displays local Indians as native
objects of study and desire (55), as “‘folk’ fodder for tourist consumption
rather than as subjects with wills of their own” and a brutal history of dispossession (33). While both Na Bolom and the government speak in the
name of the Indian through indigenismo, they encourage their dependence
and subordination. In the author’s view, both the dark young women
Sign-Reading: The Presence of Empire in Travel and Ethnography
185
kneeling over tapestries exposed to the tourists’ view and the old Indian
maids that are hidden from them become “a key symbol” of this dependence “in the social structure and consciousness of the nation” (55).
Herrera is very much aware of the postmodern questioning of ethnographic premises, the suspicion that apparently objective ethnographic
representations are influenced by imperial or colonial images of the other,
the damage of anthropology when it places its subjects back in time, and
the ethnographer’s and the traveler’s involvement in global economic
power networks. Beyond their significantly different motivations and discourses, travel and ethnography have long partaken of the logic of empire
and the relationship of authority it establishes with the other (Holland
and Huggan 2000, 11–12; Lisle 2006, 270). Travelers’ reports have been
instrumental in propagating the alleged superiority of Western civilization
through conceptualizations of the distant lands and peoples as “not yet
civilized” and “back in time” (Lisle 2006, 40–44). Likewise, ethnographers
and their apparently objective investigation of the foreign culture have
often projected Western values onto the valorization of the other as inferior and backward (Clifford 1988, 63, 65). In Mayan Drifter, travel, tourism, the ethnographic “discovery of the native,” and empire are connected
to language as an instrument of colonization and silencing of others. This
is the language that the Chicano writer has “swallowed” (Herrera 1997,
15) as a descendant from the Anglo colonizer and as a former student of
anthropology, an ethnographic language which becomes a “foreign poetics
of self ” when adopted by the natives themselves as they often become—
like Concepción, the Chamula with a PhD—tour guides into their own
villages (65).
The volume breaks down the travel/tourist binary often present in
contemporary travelogues whereby the traveler is the keen observer who
engages with “the authentic” and the tourist is a pathetic product of globalization (Lisle 2006, 77–83; Frow 1991, 127). Herrera thus underscores that
tourism and ethnography are two sides of the same coin, contributing to
the business that has long reaped profit from the natives: “How can I speak
of and for America if my entry is through the Na Bolom center in San
Cristóbal de las Casas, a museum for research on the Lacandón Maya that
has profited in many ways by the Othering of these people for almost half a
century?” (Herrera 1997, 4). Debbie Lisle’s dispute of travel writers’ entitlement to the representation of others parallels Herrera’s own misgivings as
a traveler and writer: “Indeed, what right do travel writers have to speak for
and represent others? Aren’t they in the same ethico-political conundrum
as contemporary anthropologists, who, as Clifford Geertz rightly argues,
can only ever represent others in the language of established power?” (Lisle
2006, 270). In his “Ode to the Traveling Men,” significantly titled “Nothing
Is Taken that Is not Given,” Herrera sees himself as following in the footsteps of a long list of Western colonial predecessors—missionary colonizers, archeologists, and travelers such as Don Diego de Vera Ordóñez de
Villaquiran, Fray Diego de Landa, John Lloyd Stephens, and Frans Blom
whose “language thefts for the sake of an enlightened Europe and ‘High’
America” (Herrera 1997, 105) have turned Mayans into “silent” rather than
“speaking subjects” (108). Even cultural translation is a predatory act with
colonial antecedents, “an arrow-shaped incision into the native” pervaded
by layers of linguistic and cultural colonization (127).
Deconstruction and Resignification: The Autoethnography
of “El Próspero”
In the wake of the recent theoretical postcolonial debate and its ample terminology for inquiring into subversion, mimicry, and hybridity, autoethnography has been applied to writings resisting neocolonial domination.
Mary Louise Pratt defines “autoethnography” as follows: “If ethnographic
texts are a means by which Europeans represent to themselves their (usually
subjugated) others, autoethnographic texts are those the others construct
in response to or in dialogue with those metropolitan representations”
(Pratt 1992, 7). Pratt’s term refers broadly to moments in which “colonized subjects undertake to represent themselves in ways that engage with
the colonizer’s own terms” (7). It is Herrera’s standpoint as a “colonized”
subject and his affiliation with the Indian that allows him to resignify or
“meta-ideologize” (Sandoval 2000, 111), that is, to move in, through and
out of ideologies generating ironic, denunciatory narratives where governmental and corporate rhetoric silence the natives, or where they demean
and paralyze them with stereotypes. The journey into Chiapas is, in part,
what Fredric Jameson would term a “cognitive mapping,” a search for the
tracks of the disappeared, disguised America,16 for a “hole with a past to
it.”17 The writer combines history, socioeconomic analysis, contrasted data
and statistics, expressionistic snapshots of local life, and the transcription of the texts of local protest groups, so that the brief sections in each
chapter of his travelogue piece together a geopolitical idea of Chiapas as
a different place with a multifaceted social and cultural reality connected
to the global world through conquest, capital, and social action. Extensive
research and the ironic appropriation of reality from what Foucault calls
a “subjugated standpoint” (Sandoval 2000, 173) result in an alternative
translation of the complex, hybrid, and faltering reality of the place.
The title of one of his sections, “Tuxla Oil Float,” ironically evokes the
impact of the Mexican oil assets in the global stock market on local Indians
who have been forced into movement since the government’s oil and energy
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development of the area since 1970. As he tries to identify details of Indian
culture he remembers from his previous journey, he finds a “new kind of
indio” seeking new opportunities, and reshaped by the “global political
and economic impulse for energy resources” (Herrera 1997, 22). Herrera
displays here an environmental consciousness through a language that
points at the violence, pillage, and exploitation of the land by contemporary capitalism: the “ever diminishing rain forests” and the “land shrinking to the size of a dollar bill” are caused by cables of power plants that
cut “at the yellow roots” and “eat away at the tiny reddish oval cells of the
breathing body that sustains us all,” “pushing out” and “knocking out”
campesinos, leaving “Indian communities sliced” as they move away from
their villages to find jobs in the developing energy industry (Herrera 1997,
22–23). Were it not for the critical self-mockery of his own quest for an
Indian paradise that this essay explores subsequently, this nostalgia could
be aligned with what Holland and Huggan have called “ecotopias” in contemporary travel writing (2000, 178).18
In Part II, titled “Welcome to El Próspero,” Herrera appropriately
chooses the colonial name of the area and in the neocolonial context
of twenty-first-century global capitalism. “El Próspero,” “a Spanish version of the Mayan Cibola” (Herrera 1997, 87) was the name that would
be attributed to the kingdom or province of the northern border of
Guatemala (the areas of the Chol and the Lacandón) once it had been
subjugated in the seventeenth century. In the first section of this chapter,
“The Desolations of Ocosingo,” relating his arrival at the jungle outpost,
Herrera describes his impressions on the coexistence and collision of
divergent economic and cultural structures and their effects on the local
peoples and landscape. The pessimistic tone of the section is foreshadowed
with an epigraph quoting Sub-Comandante Marcos’s ominous words to
former Mexican president Ernesto Zedillo: “Welcome to the nightmare.”
The legacy of colonial relations in the past is as ineludible as the presence
of international market forces in Ocosingo: both Ladinos and Lacandón
Mayas are caught in “the tilt between the fincas [“haciendas” where Indians
are cheap workforce] and the city.” Herrera’s description of the scrambled
landscape includes “boards, laminated roofing and brick shanties” and
“the brown-green jungle desert” (1997, 86); women selling tortillas and
men in tin booths selling Fantas and chips (87); and archeological sites
connected by roads, used by tourists where Indians from the fincas sell
goods, and refugees from Guatemala look for “the Great Mexican Last
Chance” in commercial tourist centers (87). The name of “El Próspero”
is charged with the irony of present and past conquests. Herrera deconstructs its meaning in the conqueror’s idiom by evoking the consequences
of “prosperous” colonization: the demise of a knowledgeable civilization,
a long history of tribute, forced labor, and land encroachment, imported
diseases, displacement, and the swollen bellies of children he sees as he
passes through devastated villages and forests.
In the heading of the following section, “La Ruta Maya,” Herrera once
again uses deconstruction to collapse under one single title several sides of
the same local reality in a global context: the comfortable mobility of tourists along the route through archeological ruins, the forced migration of
Mayan economic refugees searching for work, and the influx of capital and
Western commodities into the area through “combis” (small vans) along
the roads of the ruta (route). The writer describes a land despoiled of its
natural resources “in the name of the new Indian America” and oil (Herrera
1997, 88), but reminds the reader of a former history of Indian labor and
dispossession in the hands of hacienda owners by highlighting the names of
some of many abandoned campesino settlements, which are detached from
the main body of the text and vertically disposed on the page.
The Insecure Travel Writer and the Rite of Passage that “Cannot Occur”
Patterning his book as a narration of discovery, Herrera draws on the
recurrent structural leitmotif of the journey as internalized spiritual
quest or rite of passage (Clark 1999, 11). However, in the process of telling, Herrera casts suspicion and doubt on the equation between linear
physical movement and interior self-knowledge or Bildung—the totalizing
illusions that one returns a “new man” from one’s travels. Mayan Drifter
undermines the Chicano nationalist myth of the journey into the depths
of indigenous cultures as a sacralization of the pre-Columbian origins of
Chicanos.19 The journey does not offer the Chicano traveler the possibility
of spiritual self-transformation through the discovery of “a universal and
automatic bond among Mexican, Chicano, Latino and Indian peoples”
and the ultimate knowledge of “‘who we [Chicanos, Americans, Indians]
are’” (Herrera 1997, 5):
A rite of passage into Chicano and American being cannot occur: The instructions are missing or the sacred songs of the shaman woman are absent, and
the proper language and materials for the ordeal have been subverted; the
full-bodied realizations cannot be accomplished. The self is severed from the
community; the world is a fragment.
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(Herrera 1997, 7)
Telling, a process of internal and external discovery, is inscribed as drifting, a constant but often failed attempt to reach a destination in terms of
189
Do not let words like search or quest fool you . . . I wanted to leave and possibly arrive, that is all—to leave my station in the United States and arrive
at another in a demarcated limbo called Mexico. My existential motion and
puzzle through and around these two wavering points provide the opening
for this writing in and for America. One of the things I fear is the voice that
says: “You never left.” Another says “You never arrived.”
(Herrera 1997, 6)
Hence, Herrera views his book as “the unfinished poem of a desire,” “a
möbius-shaped trek backward and forward to a shattered realm of Indian
campesino villages and bodies, to an unsettled mestizaje that at every turn
aims to subvert itself ” (Herrera 1997, 6).
In one of the poetic introspective sections punctuating his descriptions
the writer equates his gradual immersion into the jungle to the search for
his Indian bones and soul: “What I left behind, many lives ago . . . without the rumble and rubble of colonists missionaries, without monteros
and chicleros,20 without PEMEX, Mexican techno-billionaires and their
petrochemical jaws” (Herrera 1997, 91). What he finds are “wary campesinos against the cables and glass,” bulldozers, digging, refugees, while
“A Zapatista glyph forms / as campesinos face the rubble” (93). Indeed,
historical severances have turned America into a composite of fragments
and the subject who writes cannot identify a single Indian culture to
absorb, exalt, or identify with. Later on, in the village of Nahá, he sees that
“fracture was omnipresent” (146): he himself, the anthropology students,
Viejo Chan K’in, and all those he meets are related to each other by fragments (147). The Mayan body Herrera wants to grasp is multiple: “Was
it the body of powerlessness, of spiritual resurrection, of petrochemical
encroachment, of genocide, revolution?”(147).
As he describes the effect of environment and travel upon his own subjectivity (“I pass through you and you pass through me” [Herrera 1997,
91]), the author becomes aware of his own colonialist biases, his intrusion into the life of others, and his embarrassment and confusion before
his lack of touch with “Indianness.” “Tumbo,” the name of the last village
of the bus route, a wood-felling station in the jungle, may in this context
stand also for a metaphor of Herrera’s own “stumbling” as a traveler and a
narrator.21 If travel “foregrounds conditioning” and “status” (Clark 1999,
14), Herrera’s “gringo” origins, his severance from his Mexican Indian
meaning and understanding. The sense of wholeness or completion that
may be the culmination of the allegorical rite of passage is, in Herrera’s
case, impossible, as he questions the progression from an old to a new self
and his actual leaving or arriving anywhere:
heritage is here consciously and self-mockingly brought into view. While
feeling apart from the people he sees because he has lost his “Indianness,”
Herrera perceptively points at the first irony of his “rite de passage” toward
his own origins: as an American from the North he distrusts these unfamiliar surroundings, while, in turn, his own appearance and rigidity cause
him to be distrusted by those with whom he is seeking to connect.
The second ironic moment leads to an epiphany about the elusive
object of his personal and ethnographic quest and about his “colonial”
guilt. We see Herrera as a fallible speaker as his errors as translator and
interpreter are exposed. Memory fails him and causes him to misapply
names to peoples and places he encountered in his previous journey in the
1970s. The visitor’s partial remembrance and knowledge of the place leads
him to mistake a village (Nahá) for another (Lacanjá); a man (K’ayum) for
another (K’ayum Ma’ax). Herrera’s goal and claim of “reuniting” with an
“old friend” become ludicrous at best when he realizes these factual errors.
In an over-compensatory gesture he gives his host, the new K’ayum, the
tape recorder (“my memory maker, my voice taker, my history recorder”)
that was never intended as a gift but as an ethnographic tool. Herrera thus
relinquishes the main objective of his trip, his “ethnographic intentions,”
which, given his incompetence, are closer to the “stumbling . . . typical of
the tourist” and the “jumble in the folly of Chicano ‘ancestor’ searches”
(Herrera 1997, 111) than to serious anthropological work. By equating
himself to the tourist, Herrera once again undoes the tourist/traveler
binary while showing his involvement in neocolonial globalization by
interpreting his sudden “generous” impulse as an exchange that reproduces
Western relations of domination on the Mayas. Western guilt hides behind
this exchange of Western technology by an “authentic experience” among
the “Savage”: “I was one more visitor dumping guilt and technology, proffering an exchange between the Modern and the Savage. Without realizing
it, I had replayed the dependence drama that the Bloms and Na Bolom had
set off in the forties” (112).
The individualistic dimension of the rite of passage is addressed in the
description of the journey to la selva (the jungle) as a delving of the writer
into his own personal pain (the separation from his father, the neglect of
his children from previous marriages) that, as he himself acknowledges,
detaches him from the reality of the people he visits (Herrera 1997, 140).
The author also addresses the traveler’s involvement in “imperialist nostalgia,” the appropriation of the other for his own spiritual self-fulfillment, his
involvement in rampant U.S. consumer culture, and the commodification
of Mexico in the United States. Before these multiple appropriations he
wonders whether, deep inside, he did not selfishly want Mexico to be filled
with a new corporate consciousness, so he could politely but self-righteously
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lament the plight of the Indian: “Maybe I was the one who wanted to own
the last tracts of moist land and the oil derricks and cubicle housing so I
could return and kneel on the raw gravel of la Ruta Maya and cry out my
sadness. Maybe I wanted things to stay the same so I could blow my own
rhetoric and feel worthy” (Herrera 1997, 256). Herrera alludes here to a
postmodern apocalyptic rhetoric of environmental extinction and danger
that, as Holland and Huggan maintain, may often be egotistic and selfcongratulatory (2000, 178–183).
Ethics and the Drift between Discourse Genres22
In the landmark study Culture and Truth (1989) Renato Rosaldo observes
that “objectivity” and “impartiality” were used to refer to positions with
great institutional authority that are now being interrogated by “the objects
of analysis,” the former ethnographic subjects that now speak. Subjects such
as Juan Felipe Herrera who stand between cultures and nations may be
seen as seeking to provide alternative knowledge through alternative forms.
The conception of travel writing that privileges “non-fiction authority (i.e.,
truth) over imaginative endeavor (i.e., the art of fictionalizing)” (Lisle 2006,
266) is here replaced by a generic hybrid that self-consciously merges history, poetry, sociology, autobiography, and drama.
The descriptive, analytical, reflexive style of the first two chapters of the
book, set in late 1992 and 1993, dialogue with two chapters in which the
author dwells on previous and later events in Mexico’s history. The poem
“Anáhuak Vortex” (Chapter 4) centers around a Mexican history characterized by the PRI’s (Partido Revolucionario Institucional) power monopoly and the violent crushing of students’ and indigenous peoples’ political
protests, and of alternative reforming voices such as Bishop Samuel Ruiz’s.
The poem also deals with the emergence of the Zapatista Revolution and
the impact of a new globalized economy on indigenous peoples. “Anáhuak
Vortex” brings together the poet’s own vital anxiety and search for origins
(“always in search, my Llorona / in Chicano accents”) and multiple images
referring to Mexico’s fragmented and variegated national reality, which he
is at pains to find a language to describe: “half in slime / half in the sky,
half in music, half in scream / half in tenderness, half in a terrible twist of
accidents” (Herrera 1997, 234); “centuries escape me, images tumble / w/o
text, on their own / without relation” (239). In his final letter to K’ayum
Ma’ax, whose whereabouts he does not know and with whom he encourages the reader to identify, Herrera presents his book as a flower offering23
to the northern and southern borders and inquires on how the recent
political and economic events such as the assassination of Luis Donaldo
Colosio, NAFTA, and the rise of the Zapatista movement will affect the
country’s future.
The overall quizzical tone of the book, responding to the poet’s perplexity before Mexico’s turbulent past and before an uncertain future
combines with the practical, didactic function of Jaguar Hotel, the play
that constitutes the entire third chapter of the volume. In Herrera’s words,
Jaguar Hotel is meant to make readers “get up and act up the book,” to
visualize a reality that “is barely visible to us on this side of ‘high’ America”
(1997, 10). In this play, drama is a consciousness-raising tool in line with
the didactic premises of Chicano teatro campesino, although it differs
from the limited scope of the Chicano genre in that it places a local reality
within a transnational web of relations that involve Mexicans, Chicanos,
Europeans, and Anglo-Americans. Written and published in English but
translated into Spanish, the text is meant to transcend the boundaries
of the English-speaking world and travel across the globalized Americas,
whose various facets within the script of global power are enacted by
Herrera’s fictional characters. The roles include the well-meaning Greta,
an old European researcher and ethnographer assaulted by colonial guilt;
Lionel, the Chicano academic tourist; Margarita, a Chicana activist who
embraces Zapatismo; a U.S. corporate entrepreneur; the soldiers, Pacheco
and Rosario, representing Mexico’s state violence; and the Mexican anthropology student advocating developmental nationalism. Local Indians and
Ladinos voice multiple positions Herrera explores in other sections of the
travel book: Nelly, a Ladina servant at the hotel, scorns the mask of philanthropy worn by a money-making hotel and research center; Maruch, an
educated Indian, earns a living as an ethnographic researcher in the service
of Europeans; Canek, a Lacandón Maya, sells out to timber companies; his
father, the old Chan Ma’ax, personifies traditional ways of life and wisdom
in the face of the “abandonment of the earth” (Herrera 1997, 180).
In her call for a generic renewal of the travelogue that brings forward
the more political and resisting potentialities of the genre, Debbie Lisle
says that “contemporary travel writing is at its best when it acknowledges
the constraints of traditional history telling, and takes seriously the difficulties of thinking critically about the linear march of time” (2006, 259).
Lisle also suggests that travel writing, in order to be critical and political,
needs to imbibe the resistance that creative writing expresses “at the level
of myth, imagination, and storytelling” (278). In terms of discourse genres,
Mayan Drifter avoids strict linear storytelling by moving, like a möbius
strip (to use Herrera’s own metaphor), from sociocultural analysis to selfintrospection, literary exercise, and back outside with a renewed awareness
that calls attention to an often ignored side of America while questioning
the institutionalized knowledge and language (the language of America)
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193
that purports to represent it. To break with this language and the authority of the Western self, he blurs the boundaries of autobiography, travel
account, and sociological investigation and complements his vision with
a language for America, which involves hermeneutics or sign-reading,
deconstruction, language play, metanarrative reflection, autoethnography,
and the fictional representation of the several voices involved in the drama
of the Americas.
Yet it is not in the mixture of genres that the subversion lies, but in the
ways in which Herrera sets these discourses against each other critically to
produce a kind of knowledge that cannot be contained by established categories of classification. As Amitava Kumar argues, “in putting ‘literary’ and
‘evidential’ [and “subjective,” we could add]” forms of narrative together,
the writer is drawing attention to “their dialectical relationship to common
historical and social processes” (2000, 225). In response to Edward Said’s
call to diffuse “a different form of history, a new kind of sociology, a new
cultural awareness,” Kumar suggests that the task of writers and intellectuals
is to provide alternative readings and to contextualize texts and events with
critical contexts, acting as translators who contest, with a political perspective, what otherwise would be seen as natural (138). Herrera’s democratic
impulse “to speak, to act” (1997, 18) provides the groundings of an interpretation of the lesser known side of America, an alternative hermeneutics,
and a hybrid, revolutionary poetics that transgresses the conventions of
the travel book. Mayan Drifter queries the literary, ethnographic, and
political discursive practices that appropriate, domesticate, and ultimately
silence the voice of a hidden America. The ethico-political dimension of
Herrera’s “methodology of the oppressed” consists in metanarrative, signreading, and deconstructive strategies that, together with self-irony, display
any encounter with others—be it in travel and tourism, or in writing and
representation—as involving authority and containment.
Notes
1. In México and in Guatemala, the term “ladino” defines mixed-blood people of
Hispanic and Mayan origin. The word appeared in the first stages of colonial
America to designate Indians proficient in Castilian Spanish. For the Indians,
being fluent in Spanish was an instrument of privilege, as those who spoke it
could escape encomienda (“commendation” this was a trusteeship labor system
instituted by the Spanish Crown during the colonization of the Americas and
the Philippines under which the Spanish consolidated their conquests; under
this system a soldier or colonist was granted a tract of land or a village together
with its Indian inhabitants) and enforced labor. Today it is often applied to any
non-Indian and defined in negative terms—by what one is not. Ladinos may
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
have some degree of Indian culture in their background, but have turned away
from it to seek a new, non-Indian, national, and urban cultural identity.
“Post-movement” writers include those from an earlier generation such as
Cherríe Moraga, Sandra Cisneros, Gloria Anzaldúa, Helena Viramontes, Ray
González, and Demetria Martínez, and those of a later generation such as
Rubén Martínez, Luis Rodríguez, Luis Alberto Urrea, and Michele Serros.
Michele Serros, however, stands apart from these writers for her often more
frivolous parody of identity politics, perhaps addressed to a younger middleclass generation of readers that may no longer share the spirit of social commitment of the early movimiento days.
Herrera is the author of twenty-four books to date. His latest publication
is the poetic anthology 187 Reasons Why Mexicanos Can’t Cross the Border
(2007). Some of his previous anthologies include Rebozos of Love (1974),
Exiles of Desire (1985), Akrílika (1989), The Roots of a Thousand Embraces
(1994), Love after the Riots (1996), Border-Crosser with a Lamborghini Dream
(1999), Thunderweavers/Tejedoras de Rayos (2000), and Notebooks of a Chile
Verde Smuggler (2002). CrashBoom Love (2000) and Cinnamon Love (2005)
are two novels in verse where he bridges young adult literature, adult themes,
and sophisticated writing. Alfred Arteaga and Rafael Pérez-Torres have examined the work of Herrera in their respective books Chicano Poetics (1997) and
Movements in Chicano Poetry (1995). To corroborate Flores’s view of Herrera
as an eclectic and constantly innovating poet, Francisco Lomelí describes
him as “the inimitable synthesizer, a factory of hybridity and a maelstrom of
non-conforming productiveness . . . [H]e does not represent only one literary
movement, but a rainbow of many tendencies” (2007, 2).
Following Jan Borm, in this essay I take the travel book or travelogue to be a
predominantly nonfictional first-person narrative of a journey that the reader
presumes to have taken place, while assuming that the author and main character are identical (1994, 17–19).
In his discussion on the definition of “Travel Writing,” “Travel Book,” and
“Travelogue,” Jan Born says that the travel book is a mosaic that may oftentimes juxtapose texts of radically different tone, voice, vocabulary, and style,
and that it may combine several genres such as the diary, the memoir, and the
letter in one single text (1994, 20–21).
Some of the representative studies that have dealt with this relationship are
Peter Hulme’s Colonial Encounters (1986), Sara Mill’s Discourses of Difference
(1993), Mary Louise Pratt’s Imperial Eyes (1992), and Steve Clark’s Travel
Writing and Empire (1999).
For an excellent overview of the state of the art in studies on life writing, see
Julia Watson and Sidonie Smith, Reading Autobiography (2001).
Charles Tatum’s lecture on Chicano autobiography at the V Congreso
Internacional de Literatura Chicana (Alcalá de Henares, May 2006).
By indigenista Herrera is here referring to literary representations, abundant in
nineteenth-century Latin American literature, which often idealize the Indian
and present them as exotic and enigmatic. These representations have often
been reinforced by official state discourse and ideology. See note 18.
194
195
10. “Indians do not seem mysterious or poetic to me. What happens is that they
live in atrocious poverty” (Herrera 1997, 9).
11. Texts such as Hunger of Memory (1982) by Richard Rodríguez, Loving in the
War Years: Lo que nunca pasó por sus labios (1983) by Cherríe Moraga, House
on Mango Street (1984) by Sandra Cisneros, Borderlands/La Frontera (1987) by
Gloria Anzaldúa, Canícula (1991) by Norma Cantú, House of Houses (1997) by
Pat Mora, or Memory Fever (1999) by Ray González.
12. As Adrienne Rich has put it in her essay “Notes towards a Politics of Location”
in Love, Bread and Poetry, “a place on the map is also a place in history” (1987,
212), so that the position one occupies in time and space [and language, we
could also add], has to do with patterns of social, “racial,” and colonial inequality, power, and privilege. In Foucault’s words, a “subject position” is that
number of enunciative modalities that a subject “can occupy or be given when
making a discourse,” the “discontinuities of the planes from which he [/she]
speaks” (Foucault 1972, 54–55). Judith Butler’s more recent notion of “performativity” suggests that individuals do not necessarily fill subject positions
determined by technologies of power. The discursive norm and its production
or performance are never identical (Butler 1992, 14–15).
13. Herrera uses this very same metaphor in his bilingual poetry sequence
Thunderweavers/Tejedoras de Rayos (2000). The collection pays tribute to the
villagers killed by paramilitary agents in Acteal in 1997 by inserting the reader
into the minds and voices of four women from one family.
14. In Culture and Truth Renato Rosaldo defines “imperialist nostalgia” as the
yearning by the agents of colonialism “for the colonized culture as it was ‘traditionally’ (that is as they first encountered it). The peculiarity of their yearning
is that agents of colonialism long for the very forms of life they intentionally
altered or destroyed” (Rosaldo 1989, 68–69). In “Tourism and the Semiotics of
Nostalgia” (1991), John Frow has shed further light on the role of nostalgia in
the contemporary tourist industry, where, as he sees it, the commodification of
otherness extends the inequality between the First and the Third Worlds, and
developed and undeveloped regions. Under the guise of taking modernity and
development to underdeveloped regions, tourism holds back development
through the international control of capital. The very lack of development of
certain areas is the appealing element for visitors.
15. Indigenista ideology is generally understood to be a complex, interrelated, and
extensive set of governmental actions, declarations, and policies addressed
toward indigenous peoples and communities. It is the ideological, legal, and
economic relationship that the state has maintained with the indigenous
populations, which it considers subordinate and has sought to integrate in
national life since the 1940s (Sámano Renteria 2004, 141). Since its early
stages, indigenismo has relied on paradoxical premises: on the one hand,
it views indigenous cultures as part of the historical national heritage of
Mexico, and therefore deserving of preservation and documentation; on the
other, it assumes that indigenous peoples need to be “Westernized,” acculturated and assimilated into a Westernized Mexico, and thus eventually become
“Mexicanized.”
16. Questioning the idea that America was discovered, in “El descubrimiento de
América que todavía no fue,” the Uruguayan thinker and journalist Eduardo
Galeano says that the Spanish colonial enterprise was not a discovery (“descubrimiento”), but instead a cover or a disguise (“encubrimiento”): “But we could
say that America was not discovered in 1492 because those who invaded it, did
not know, or could not see her. Gonzalo Guerrero, the conqueror, did see it.
Some prophets, like Bartolomé de las Casas, Vasco de Quiroga or Bernardino de
Sahagún, did see it, and because they saw it they loved it and were condemned
to loneliness. But the warriors, notaries, and merchants who came in search of
swift fortune and who imposed their religion and culture as the only, obligatory
truth, did not see America” (Galeano 1991, 120) (my translation).
17. In his epigraph to the “Tuxla Oil Float” Herrera quotes the lines from Lorna
Dee Cervantes’s poem “Beneath the Shadow of the Freeway” from her collection Emplumada.
18. The critics define “ecotopias” as those travel narratives that bring together a
commercialized fascination with worlds and customs that are disappearing
and a reverence for an endangered nature, which is also commodified as a site
of spiritual regeneration and alternative lifestyle.
19. For more detailed accounts of indigenista discourse in Chicano/a cultural politics, see Jorge Klor de Alva’s “California Chicano Literature and Pre-Columbian
Motifs: Foil and Fetish” (1986) and Daniel Cooper-Alarcón’s The Aztec
Palimpsest: Mexico in the Modern Imagination (1997).
20. “Chicleros,” who have worked for generations on the extraction of latex and the
manufacture of chewing gum, migrated to the Lacandón region in the 1930s
and 1940s. “Monteros” refers to those who worked in conditions of semislavery
in the cedar wood-cutting industry that developed in the nineteenth century in
the area.
21. Coincidentally, in Spanish, “dar tumbos” means to lurch, to move slowly,
unsteadily, and abruptly.
22. By “discourse genres” or “genres of discourse” John Frow understands different
conventions and registers within the text as well as the positions and voices
that are suitable for a variety of speakers, including the narrator in a novel,
the main speaker in an autobiography, or the characters in a play. All of them
(legal, literary, colloquial, and scientific registers) are determined by certain
knowledge conditions (1986, 158).
23. Understanding flowers as words is in tune with the Náhuatl notion of “flower
and song” (“flor y canto”) where the poem is a form of prayer or divine offering. Chicano poets like Alurista adopted this idea in the late 1960s and 1970s
to link their work to the pre-Columbian poems of Mesoamerica.
196
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———. 2000. Tejedoras de Rayos/Thunderweavers. Tucson: Arizona University
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Holland, Patrick, and Graham Huggan. 2000. Tourists with Typewriters: Critical
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167–179. London: Ashgate.
¿Dónde estás vos/z?:
Performing Salvadoreñidades
in Washington, DC
Ana Patricia Rodríguez
R
ecent discussions about the Salvadoran diaspora have focused primarily on the transnational movement of migrants from El Salvador
to various locations in the United States (Sánchez Molina 2005; BakerCristales 2004; Hamilton and Stoltz Chinchilla 2001; Menjívar 2000;
Cadaval 1998; Mahler 1995a, 1995b; Repak 1995). Salvadoran labor migration and the production of material and cultural capital associated with it
have been routinely traced from El Salvador to divergent locations, and
from these sites back to El Salvador (Mahler 2000). People, money, media,
communication, and various material and cultural goods would seem to
travel on transnational routes between determined points of departure
and arrival. There are sending and receiving cities, poles of expulsion
and attraction, and sites of dislocation and relocation in places such as
Chirilandría, a housing complex (a la Salvadoran colonia [neighborhood]
style) in northern Virginia duly named after the town of Chirilagua
located in eastern El Salvador, and streets in Intipucá City, El Salvador,
renamed after streets in Washington, DC (Pedersen 2002, 1995). There
are “hermanos lejanos,” or Salvadoran immigrants, said to be yearning to
return to their “homeland,” a diasporic province called “Departamento
15” that extends virtually across the world, and Salvadoran cultural satellites all seemingly linking up to an imaginary national control center that
is El Salvador.1 Registering these comings and goings of Salvadoreños/
as, this essay explores the production and performance of Salvadoran
identities, or Salvadoreñidades, in translocal contexts, particularly that
11
ANA PATRICIA RODRÍGUEZ
of Washington, DC, where a vibrant Salvadoran diasporic community
is finding its place and voice in the Nation’s Capital. Through a study
of Washington, DC−based performance texts by Quique Avilés, Culture
Clash (CC), and Lilo González and los de la Mount Pleasant, I examine
Salvadoran cultural identity construction under the particular strain of
transmigration, interlingualism, and racialization in the Washington,
DC, Metropolitan Area (i.e., Washington, DC, Maryland, and northern
Virginia). In this chapter, I focus, in particular, on the uses and disuses of
the colloquial Salvadoran speech act of vosear (the informal second person
singular pronoun “you”) in the production of Salvadoran American voces
(voices) and the hybridization of U.S. Salvadoran identities. Animated by
a set of cultural interrogatives, I ask: ¿Dónde estás vos/z? Where are you,
vos, Salvadoreño/a, in the subjective sense of the question? Indeed, where
and how are Salvadoran voces and voices being articulated in the diasporic
locations that Salvadorans occupy?
Exploring the dis/use of the Salvadoran colloquial form of speech,
the informal voseo characteristically associated with national Salvadoran
identity and the performance of voz (voice) and cultural identity, I resituate the discussion of Salvadoran transnational migration wherein the
Salvadoran diaspora is defined almost exclusively and unilaterally in relation to El Salvador as its center and core. Rather, I explore the production
and performance of Salvadoran identities, or Salvadoreñidades, in translocal contexts, or interlinked locations extending across diasporic sites such
as Los Angeles, San Francisco, Long Island, Melbourne, San José de Costa
Rica, and Washington, DC, the focus of this chapter. Indeed, as local DC
Salvadoran poet and performance artist Quique Avilés recounts in his
poem titled “El Salvador At-A-Glance” (2003), “El Salvador’s major cities [are presently]: San Salvador / San Miguel / Santa Ana / Los Angeles /
San Wachinton, D.C.” (11; my emphasis). Avilés’s cultural geography of
the Salvadoran nation widens to include and recognize the Salvadoran
diaspora residing outside of the geopolitical borders of the country yet
within its extended geocultural reaches. In “El Salvador At-A-Glance,”
Avilés explores the reconfiguration of El Salvador according to a transnational logic and global economic system, by which El Salvador’s “major
exports” include “coffee, sugar, city builders, busboys, waiters, poets” (10).
In this logic, immigrants are both producers and products, generating
socioeconomic and cultural remittances that are greatly transforming
El Salvador and Salvadoran society as a whole. Both used by and using
the transnational economy for the purposes of producing remittances,
as Avilés claims, El Salvador lies, for the diaspora, just beneath the skin
like a “[l]ittle question mark that begins to itch” and to disturb those who
“were supposed to clean carpets / not ask for time out and dialogue” (10).
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203
Implied, though not explicitly articulated, Avilés’s poem, thus, begs the question: What is it like to be Salvadoran outside of El Salvador in Washington,
DC, “in the strangest moments / in the strangest cities / under the strangest circumstances” (11)?
In the context of DC and along with local cultural producers like
Avilés, I explore the artistic production and representation of a vibrant
Salvadoran community, which is articulating a locally inflected and
homegrown voz in the Nation’s Capital, one that is no longer singularly
Salvadoran but part of a range of diasporic Salvadoreñidades. More specifically, I ponder Salvadoran identity construction in the United States
under the creative strain of transnational immigration, transculturation,
interlingualism, and what I call interracialization, all processes serving as
points of contact between different ethnic, racial, linguistic, cultural, and
other groups in the United States beyond the primary contact with the
Salvadoran nation. Indeed, we are no longer in El Salvador, vos, but we are
producing new Salvadoreñidades in other contexts and with other linguistic, cultural, and historical materials. Thus, I explore how at a distance,
apart and in their own right, Salvadorans in different translocal sites are
producing vos and voz, diasporic subjectivities, identities, cultures, and
languages. The production and performance of Salvadoreñidades can be
found in the greater Washington, DC, Metropolitan Area, just as in the
greater Los Angeles region and the San Francisco Bay Area, each representing translocal sites that can be examined in their own right and in relation to one another, larger global trends, and specific local developments
as is the case of Salvadoran performances and cultural texts produced in
Washington, DC.
1. Culture Clash in the District
Home to possibly over 600,000 Salvadorans in some counts,2 the
Washington, DC, Metropolitan Area attracted the attention of the wellknown Latino theater/comedy troupe, Culture Clash (CC). In 2000, Culture
Clash came to the area to conduct research on DC’s multiethnic and multiracial communities, including the Salvadoran diaspora in the Nation’s
Capital. Interviewing and working with local Salvadoran American poet
and performer Quique Avilés and other community artists and activists
in the fall of 2002, in the midst of the DC sniper rampage, CC produced
and performed Anthems: Culture Clash in the District at the Arena Stage.
Anthems presented not only the “multicultural story” of an often culturally, racially, and socioeconomically stratified Washington, DC, but also
the transnational narrative of Salvadorans in the District in the post-9/11
context. Specializing in the production of what might be called translocal
PERFORMING SALVADOREÑIDADES IN WASHINGTON, DC
theater, or theater produced in interlinked local sites (e.g., Mission Magic
Mystery Tour set in San Francisco; Chavez Ravine, in Los Angeles; Nuyorican
Stories, in New York City; Miami Mambo, in Miami), Culture Clash now
produced Anthems in and for the District (to the best of my knowledge,
the play has not been produced and performed in its entirety outside
of Washington, DC). CC’s Richard Montoya and Ric Salinas (without
Salvadoran Chicano third member Herbert Siguenza) appeared to take a
special interest in the Salvadoran community in the District, and made it
the focus of two significant scenes in the production.
One year prior to the performance, the Arena Stage had commissioned
CC to produce a “site-specific” piece on Washington, DC. The product
turned out to be a collage of scenes, characters, and events based on
interviews that CC conducted with people in the District. According to
Molly Smith, the Artistic Director of the Arena Stage, Anthems gave “us
an entirely unofficial and unauthorized tour of the city—shot through
the lens of Culture Clash’s wild comic imagination” (2003, 155). In an
effort to write “anthems,” or narratives of this city, at once the Nation’s
Capital and local home to District residents, the main character and narrator of the play—a writer, performed by Montoya—walked in and out
of the lives of loosely disguised characters of the District. CC represented
famous politicians and socialites, black and white “native Washingtonians,”
and people from various local diasporic communities, including African
American residents, Muslim refugees, and Salvadoran immigrants. Even
Tian Tian, one of the émigré pandas at the National Zoo, made several
cameo appearances, offering metareflections on the city, as when he says:
“D.C. can be a real jungle and you people can be animals sometimes”
(Culture Clash 2003, 158), and, “Look at me I’m a black-and-white panda
bear in a mostly black-and-white town . . . Black patches, white patches,
together, apart, slightly segregated, but in the same general area” (159).
Indeed, Culture Clash in Anthems stood up to the challenge of critically
representing Washington, DC’s most hidden faces, facets, and issues. As
Smith claims, in CC’s Anthems, “we see some familiar faces and places, but
mostly we encounter ordinary, everyday people we rarely see or hear on
stage” (155).
In CC’s montage of the District, the audience catches fleeting glimpses
of immigrant Salvadoran life. In one brief scene titled “The Ballad of
Douglas Martínez,” Ric Salinas—the Salvadoran American member of
the Clash team—pantomimed the movements of a civil war refugee
fleeing La Union, El Salvador, in 1984. In wordless action, Martínez is
shown dodging bullets in his country, running across the U.S.-Mexican
border, and crossing the Potomac River in a symbolic reenactment of
George Washington’s famous crossing of the Delaware River, all the while
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205
searching for his destination—the Lincoln Memorial, “a dream com[e]
true” (Culture Clash 2003, 200). In Washington, DC, Martínez is seen
again noiselessly caught in another crossfire and battleground. This time,
however, it is not the Salvadoran Civil War (1979–1992), but rather the
Mount Pleasant Riots, which exploded in a Salvadoran neighborhood of
Washington, DC, on May 5, 1991. At the end of the scene, Douglas is seen
silently dying in the streets of Prince George’s County, Maryland, while
walking home from work one evening. In a stage voice-over, the audience
hears a live DC news telecast: “The first reported black on Latino murder
occurred tonight in Prince George’s County” (200). The silent representation of Douglas Martínez’s death in the streets of Prince George’s County
is chilling, for it brings to center stage the plight of many Salvadoran
immigrants in the Nation’s Capital, many of whom have been made nearly
invisible and silenced by what Lauren Berlant calls the “national culture
industry” (2002, 185).
In The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and
Citizenship (2002), Berlant calls attention to a “national culture industry”
engaged in the production, commodification, and consumption of acceptable “native citizens” as well as unacceptable noncitizens, immigrants,
and others in the cultural imaginary of the United States (175–220).
Through readings of various mass-media texts including a volume of
Time Magazine, Berlant identifies normative “native citizens” as “implicitly native-born, white, [heterosexual] male salaried citizens” (193) and
“infantilized citizens” as those necessarily made “anesthetized, complacent, unimaginative” by a hegemonic ethos and politics (199). Subject to,
unquestioning of, and often supportive of a U.S. world order, the ideal
citizens of the United States, according to Berlant, embody an “infantile
citizenship” shaped by patriotism, individualism, and (almost blind)
“faith in the nation” (27) and “the state’s commitment to representing the
best interests of ordinary people” (27–28). This citizen ideal looms large
over would-be citizens, including foreigners, immigrants, minorities, and
other unincorporated, marginalized, and/or excluded communities (185),
who are called to have “faith in the nation” in order to assume their place
in U.S. society. As Berlant explains, for all their negative and ambivalent
representation by the “national culture industry,” immigrants not only
revitalize the United States with their labor and cultural contributions, but
moreover serve as “symbolic evidence for the ongoing power of American
democratic ideals” (195). In their desire for incorporation into the U.S.
nation, immigrants assume, to various degrees, the “faith in the nation”
held by “native citizens” at large.
In the education of immigrants, Berlant underscores the role of the
“national culture industry [which] seeks to stipulate that only certain kinds
of people, practices, and property that are, at core, ‘American,’ deserve juridical and social legitimation” (185). Films and mass-media texts of various
genres such as Forrest Gump, The Pelican Brief, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,
and the parodic episode of The Simpsons, “Mr. Lisa goes to Washington,” in
Berlant’s analysis, serve to highlight how the figure of the “infantile citizen”
and the trope of the pilgrimage to Washington, DC, reproduce the monumental yet empty signifiers of American patriotism. These texts, as Berlant
suggests, serve to reify modes of inclusion and exclusion in the nation,
especially for immigrants. In regard to the significance of immigrants’ narratives, Berlant writes, “Their [immigrant portraits and stories] importance
is in the ways they express how completely generic immigrant hopes and
dreams might unfold from particular bodies, and they tell a secret story
about a specific migrant’s odds for survival—by which Time means successful Americanization” (197). Living in the shadow of monumental signifiers
and experiencing “citizenship” on more disenfranchised terms, Salvadoran
and other immigrant and minority communities in the greater Washington,
DC, Metropolitan Area, I posit here, offer significant revisions of the vacuous citizenship narrative, albeit on symbolic and cultural terms rather than
legal and political ones. A great number of Salvadoran immigrants in the
region, after all, remain marginalized and disenfranchised labor citizens of
the Metropolitan Area, often working and living without legal residency
and much less U.S. political citizenship and representation. Along with
Berlant and other critics of an exclusive “national culture industry,” I seek
to understand how Salvadoran immigrants are inscribing themselves into
the national and local narratives of Washington, DC, while at the same time
producing new modes of cultural citizenship.
In Latino Cultural Citizenship: Claiming Identity, Space and Rights
(1997), Flores and Benmayor suggest that for many Latinos/as in the
United States cultural citizenship embodies a significant set of social practices. They explain:
In this way, immigrants who might not be citizens in the legal sense or who
might not even be in this country legally, but who labor and contribute to
the economic and cultural wealth of the country, would be recognized as
legitimate political subjects claiming rights for themselves and their children, and in that sense as citizens. (11)
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The term and practice of “cultural citizenship” is particularly significant
for Central Americans, who have been historically and indiscriminately
denied legal immigrant and resident status in the United States. In the geopolitical context of the 1980s, people fleeing the armed conflict in the isthmus were generally classified as economic rather than political refugees,
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and many were deported to their deaths in El Salvador, Guatemala, and
Nicaragua. In more recent times, Central American migrants have been
subject to a politically ambiguous and restrictive condition produced
by their migratory “Temporary Protected Status” (TPS), which makes
it possible for undocumented immigrants to work indefinitely in the
United States without legal residency. For many undocumented Central
Americans, living in a prolonged state of legal indeterminacy creates a
sense of instability and disempowerment. While Central Americans continue to struggle to acquire full legal and political citizenship status in the
United States, “cultural citizenship” might provide a venue for political
action and agency in the here and now, especially when their prolonged
TPS and undocumented condition threaten to foreclose all possibility of
political organizing. I ask, then, how do Salvadoran transmigrants produce
and perform a “cultural citizenship” of their own in the United States?
2. Where are the Americans?
In their performance of Anthems, CC tapped into the nearly invisible
narrative of the transmigration of Salvadorans to the Washington, DC,
region, which in itself is a highly dynamic contact zone of diverse racial,
ethnic, and inter/national groups. In this context, U.S. Salvadoran identity
is being transformed not only in proximity and in contact with U.S. mainstream and Latino American identities, but moreover by African American
identities. In a second Anthems scene featuring Salvadoran characters,
titled “Salvadoran Jungle Fever/Fiebre de la Selva,” Noe Ramírez, a fortysomething Salvadoran immigrant father, recalls the shock experienced by
his family when they resettled in DC in the 1980s. He explains that U.S.made TV programs broadcast in El Salvador and U.S. imperialist goodwill
messengers (all part of an exported U.S. “national culture industry” consumed in Latin America) did not prepare the family for what they would
encounter in their transmigration. He says,
We came to Washington, D.C., in 1984, and landed on 14th and Irving. I said
“Puta! This look more like Good Times.” We didn’t know the capital of the
United States was Africa! Puta! Where were the gringos? Where were the tall,
blond, blue-eyed guys from the Peace Corps that I met in El Salvador?
(Culture Clash 2003, 201)
Unprepared to face a multiracial, multiethnic, and multilingual United
States, Noe tells of machete-armed fights with African American youths
in high school, a story that Quique Avilés also describes in his own life
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We were the new immigrants on the block, it was tough . . . There was a lot
of violence, people getting stabbed. And so, we started to fight back: “La ley
del machete.” We would take machetes to school. Los Negros started getting
hurt, people getting cut. It was nasty. Then word got out, “Don’t mess with
the Salvadorans, the ‘migos,’ cause they got the big knives.” We had to fight
or die—survival. Finally, the black community said, “OK, these people are
here to stay, so we’re gonna have to deal with them.” (201)
Through the character of Noe, CC taps into one of the least publicly
aired subjects in the District—race relations beyond the white-and-black
and, more distinctively, involving African Americans, Africans, Muslims,
Haitians, Latin Americans, Salvadorans, and other groups. Indeed, the
subject of how Latino immigration, particularly Salvadoran immigration,
is creating a new ethnoracial and cultural “borderlands” of sorts, south of
the historic racial boundary that is the Mason-Dixon Line, is rarely if ever
openly acknowledged and discussed in Washington, DC.
Over the last decades, the Washington, DC, Metropolitan Area has
become home to one of the fastest growing and most diverse Latino/a
populations in the United States. In 2000, the population of the District
of Columbia was calculated at 572,059 persons, of whom approximately
60 percent were African Americans, 30 percent non-Hispanic whites,
8 percent Latinos, 3 percent Asians, 0.3 percent Native Americans, 0.1
percent Hawaiian or other Pacific Islanders, 4 percent other races, and
almost 2 percent multiracial. The U.S. Census Bureau also estimated that
over 44,953 Latinos/as lived in the District of Columbia, amid a majority
population of African Americans and others. According to the Census
2000, the percentage of Latinos/as was 4.7 percent in Virginia and 4.3
percent in Maryland. These figures, however, do not take into account
the even larger number of undocumented Latino/a immigrants (many
of whom are Central Americans, especially Salvadorans) in the region,
who comprise a great part of the labor force not only in the District but
in the entire region as well. It is not surprising, then, that Salvadorans
are a significant socioeconomic force in the region and that Salvadoran
cultural markers (e.g., restaurants, grocery stores, celebrations, Spanish
language variants, etc.) have become the most visible and audible signs
of Latinidad in the region. In contrast to California and the Southwest,
where the majority of Latinos/as are of Mexican heritage, Salvadorans in
the DC area are identified as the primary Latino/a population (Singer et
al. 2001, Singer 2003).3
experiences and performances, and that partially provides the ethnographic basis for CC’s representation in this scene. Noe explains,
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Calling the District of Columbia his home as his family acculturates
to their surroundings, Noe Ramírez of CC’s Anthems is shocked one day
to find that his U.S.-raised Salvadoran son has become a “stranger in my
house” (2003, 202). This son no longer speaks Spanish, but rather a variant of hybridized hip-hop languages, with a sampling of informal heritage
Spanish, street English, and African American popular idioms. When Noe
tells or rather orders young Enrique to “Hey, speak English! . . . Hablá
Inglés . . . [vos]” (202), Noe is using an imperative speech act, “hablá,” in
the informal voseo, which Enrique apparently does not use or understand.
Enrique and his father, thus, engender not only a generation gap but a cultural and linguistic one as well. While Noe attempts to speak in Salvadoran
Spanish to his son, Enrique appears no longer able to vosear, manifesting
a lack that might be taken as a breach or break with Salvadoran national
identity. Instead, Enrique answers in a language beyond his father’s comprehension: “I’m speaking English, doggy-dog” (202). To the father’s
greater surprise, it is Enrique’s African American girlfriend, Lashanda, who
greets him saying, “How you doing, Mr. Ramirez? Oh—como estas?” (no
accent marks, 202). In this contact zone of sorts, Salvadoran Americans
and African Americans are not only mixing and dating but also producing
transcultural interethnic identities, or what Montoya in his “Afterword” to
Anthems calls “mixed and remixed living histories.” According to Montoya,
Latinos/as are also learning about and recuperating their “Negritude,” or
African cultural and racial identities (Culture Clash 2003, 224). In his
monologue, Noe reveals what are perhaps the greatest lessons learned
from living in DC. He says,
There are no black people in El Salvador, so we never knew any, we never
had contact. Salvadorans are very prejudiced people. But we [Salvadorans
and African Americans] have a lot in common. Oh si, we’re both jinchos,
country folk, we are both family-oriented, go to church, we work side by
side, we like greasy-ass food, we like to swear a lot, por la gran puta—we’re
in the same boat. (201)
Alluding to Salvadorans’ often uninterrogated biases, blatant racisms, and
internalized colonialisms, papá Noe inadvertently suggests the possibility
of building alliances, solidarities, and interracial and interethnic relations,
especially with African Americans in the District. After all, as residents
of the District, “we’re in the same boat,” living side-by-side in places like
Mount Pleasant, Columbia Heights, Anacostia, and elsewhere. Moreover,
Latinos/as and African Americans share an extended history of exclusion
in the United States. Among groups with shared disenfranchised histories
and social positions, alliances could be built around issues of living wages,
affordable housing, proper healthcare, and access to education, immigration, and other rights. These are issues that affect a great number of
disenfranchised communities—including African Americans and Latinos/
as—in the District of Columbia and elsewhere as manifested in the 2006
multiethnic mobilizations and marches for immigrant civil rights in the
United States.
Along these lines, DC Salvadoran singer, composer, and community
activist, Lilo González suggests the possibilities of transnational coalition
building among Latinos/as and African Americans in his musical composition titled “Las historias prohibidas de Pedro y Tyrone” (The Forbidden
Tales of Pedro and Tyrone) from his CD A quien corresponda . . . (1994).4
Invoking in the song’s title Salvadoran poet Roque Dalton’s Historias
prohibidas del pulgarcito (The Prohibited Stories of El Salvador—The
Tom Thumb of Central America, as the country is known for its small
geographic territory), Lilo González and his musical group los de la
Mount Pleasant chronicle young Pedro’s immigration to DC from El
Salvador, including his separation from his parents, his life in the streets,
his search for day jobs, his consumption of drugs, and his general disillusion and disempowerment as a noncitizen or disenfranchised subject of
the United States. Pedro’s exclusion from the “native citizenry,” as Berlant
might posit, is mirrored in the telling of Tyrone’s life in Washington, DC.
As González tells us, Pedro and Tyrone, both of whom are young, male,
and poor, live in the “shadow of the White House” and amidst social,
economic, and racial violence. In the 1991 Mount Pleasant Riots, Latinos/
as and African Americans (personified in the song by Pedro and Tyrone)
retaliated against institutional forms of economic, political, and social
disenfranchisement in their communities. Like in many U.S. cities, African
American and Latino/a youths in the District of Columbia live in neighborhoods adversely affected by lack of employment, education, housing,
and opportunities (Jennings and Lusane 1994). González’s song, which is
set to reggae, tells of “Negro matando a negro, / negro matando a Latino, /
Latino matando a negro, / Latino matando a Latino” (Black killing Black, /
Black killing Latino, / Latino killing Black, / Latino killing Latino). But, as
the song suggests, that narrative must be transformed and revised, if not
altogether rewritten.
A product of the 1980s immigration of Salvadorans to the area, the
lyrical Pedro is orphaned, homeless, and addicted to crack. At six years of
age, he emigrated from his war-torn country, but in DC he has grown prematurely old and hopeless: “Llegó buscando a estas tierras, / la estatua de la
libertad, / pero ella estaba muy alta, / me dijo, no la pude yo alcanzar” (He
came to this land in search of, / the Statue of Liberty, / but she was much
too high, / he told me, I wasn’t able to reach her). The Statue of Liberty,
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symbolizing U.S. opportunity, freedom, and justice, does not extend her
hand to these new immigrants from Central America. Instead, the statue
represents the denial of (unalienable) refugee rights to a people who were
assaulted in its own land by the economic and military forces of the United
States during the Cold War era and in the present stages of globalization.
The song seems to ask: Do Salvadorans not have the right to seek refuge
in the United States? Caught shorthanded in the middle of two cultures
without the material and creative means to use his social capital, Pedro
learns to think and live in the present and to survive by his own wits: “[s]
iempre piensa en el presente / suspira por el pasado, / conociendo nuestra
historia, / Pedro, el futuro es tu regalo” (He always thinks in the present, /
he always longs for the past, / but if you know your own history, / Pedro,
the future shall be your reward). Pedro’s counterpart, Tyrone, also lives in
the margins, in the shadow of the White House, overwhelmed by power,
poverty, and oppression.
Underscoring the parallels in Pedro and Tyrone’s lives, González’s song
leads to the conclusion that Pedro and Tyrone equally lack access to education, employment, personal security, and affirmation of their human
potential. Both are overcome by a sense of entrapment, alienation, and
disenfranchisement, and contorted into “infantile citizens” denied the ideals of the American dream. Both youths, the song suggests, have internalized the capitalist imperative and consumption narrative, “que ser y tener,
es igual” (that what you have is what you are). And if you have nothing,
you are nothing. The lyrics to the song, however, challenge the materialist
American ideals so heavily tied to free enterprise, consumption, and commodification, asserting to Pedro and Tyrone that “you are . . . no matter
what car you drive.” In its final appeal, the song calls the youths to creative
intervention and uprising in their lives, despite their experiences of civil
and urban warfare. In an indictment of Tyrone and Pedro’s disenfranchisement (what Berlant calls “infantilizing”) by greater economic and material
forces, González’s song imagines the possibility of forging alliances between
ethnic, racial, and diasporic communities: “¿Por qué no se ponen en onda,
/ luchando por el pueblo de Sudáfrica, / ¿por qué no se ponen en onda, /
luchando por la paz en América” (Why don’t you get high, / supporting
the people of South Africa, / why don’t you get high, / struggling for peace
in America?). Ultimately, Lilo González and los de la Mount Pleasant produce a discourse that is highly critical of the racial, ethnic, and class hierarchies that structure the barrios and neighborhoods of many U.S. cities,
divide Latinos/as, African Americans, and other groups from one another,
and “infantilize” its less-than citizenry. Moreover, González and los de la
Mount Pleasant sketch a narrative of the highly neglected and excluded
Salvadoran immigrant citizenry, as Pedro struggles to survive in the streets
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3. What Languages Does Your Salvadoreñidad Speak?
It is to this transmigrated, transculturated, and often irreversibly transformed Salvadoreñidad that Quique Avilés turns in his collection of
poems titled The Immigrant Museum (2003).5 Avilés reminds us that the
Washington, DC, Metropolitan Area is now home to upward of 400,000
“Wachintonian Salvadoreans” (Avilés, “El Salvador At-A-Glance,” 10–11),
giving the city new tongue-twisting contours and mixed voces. In his poem,
“Latinhood” (8–10), Avilés explores a DC “Latinhood” as sensed, shaped,
and heard in the streets of the District of Columbia. The echoes of this
Salvadoran Latinidad elicit from the poet a poignant line of questioning,
when he asks, “What does it feel like inside? / what color is this latinhood?
/ how does it do what it does? . . . What language does it like to speak?
cachitquel / spanish / nahuatl / creole / or english” (8–9)? What does this
Salvadoran Latinidad speak when the Salvadoran diaspora is spread widely
across the United States, Mexico, Europe, Asia, and Australia, among other
places? “How do you know that you are a latin? / that you are not a russian
impostor with a peruvian accent,” Avilés ironically asks those who would
seem to think and argue that the key identifier of Latino/Hispanic identity
is the Spanish language (Avilés 2003, 9; García Bedolla 2003). Instead,
Avilés suggests in the same poem that U.S. Salvadoran identity has more
to do with the ability to masticate or domesticate multiple languages into
new hybrid articulations or code-switching practices such as those performed by Chicano, Nuyorican, and other U.S. Latino/a communities. For
Avilés, a local Latinhood or Latinidad, or Salvadoreñidad is “the simple
ability / to swallow the world at birth / keeping it / learning to chew at it /
letting it grow / letting it grow inside” (2003, 9), invariably incorporating
local histories, experiences, and languages and speaking in creative mixes
that have been more technically defined as linguistic and cultural codeswitching.
What CC, Quique Avilés, Lilo González and los de la Mount Pleasant,
and other Salvadoran-focused cultural producers, such as the Los Angeles
and San Francisco-based young writers’ collective that published its work
in the groundbreaking anthology, Izote Vos: A Collection of Salvadoran
American Writing and Visual Arts (2000), have in common, I suggest
here, is the articulation of U.S.-made Salvadoran hybridized identities,
of Washington, DC, reaching for memories, dreams, and prospects. “Sí se
puede” [Yes we can], the song seems to say, plaintively calling out to the
Pedros and Tyrones of DC: “Why don’t you get high, / struggling for peace
in America.” America, in this case, is the Américas, produced in the contact
zones of urban interethnic and interracial communities such as DC.
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or Salvadoreñidades made in the United States. In speaking local variants
of Spanish—California Chicanoized Salvadoran Spanish or English, or
“Wachintonian” African Americanized Hip Hop Salvadoran Spanglish—
U.S.-raised Salvadorans are articulating their own homebred experiences,
transnational migration histories, translocal settlement patterns, generational identity shifts, and transcreative languages (Flores and Yúdice 1990).
These greater sociocultural transformations are encoded in the mixed languages spoken especially by young generations of Salvadoran Americans,
“Salvis” as some California youths call themselves, or “Wachintonians”
as Quique Avilés calls his cohort of Salvadorans in the Washington, DC,
region. When, for example, U.S.-born or raised Salvadorans use, or do not
use in their daily idioms the informal second person singular pronoun
vos, a most significant speech act and dis/claiming of cultural identity is
in progress. As sociolinguists explain, the use of vos, tú, and usted in Latin
American Spanish variants are markers of solidarity, intimacy, distance
or deference, and power, among other things (Vaquero de Ramírez 1998;
Quesada Pacheco 2000).
For various historical reasons, the voseo is not used in most of Mexico
and the Hispanophone Caribbean, but it is used widely in Argentina,
Uruguay, and Paraguay; parts of Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, Venezuela, and
the states of Chiapas and Tabasco, Mexico; and in almost all of Central
America with the exception of Panama (Stewart 1999, 123–124; Quesada
Pacheco 2000, 86–89). But as Miranda Stewart, citing the work of John
Lipski, explains, “In El Salvador a three-way system appears to be developing amongst the educated urban classes . . . , where vos and Ud. [usted]
occupy the extremes of intimacy on the one hand and respect on the other,
with tú occupying an intermediate position, signifying familiarity but not
intimacy” (Stewart 1999, 126). To speak in vos or to vosear, hence, is to
claim an intimate colloquial subjectivity, for the voseo in El Salvador (and
most of Central America) is used in daily communication, in informal and
intimate relationships and cultural exchanges, among equals and loved
ones, and in the formation of a popular national idiom and imaginary. It
is worth emphasizing that as Stewart explains, tú in El Salvador signifies
“familiarity but not intimacy,” while vos implies intimacy and belonging.
As Salvadorans, Central Americans, and others of the voseo linguistic
region absorb the media-generated standard Spanish of the United States,
they may substitute tú for vos, or eliminate the use of vos altogether. The
negotiation of the intimate colloquial vos, I suggest here, is significant, for
it may signify a breach or distance from (or on the other hand, a desire for)
Salvadoran culture, traditions, and community, among other things. Fully
aware of the signifying potential of vos/voz, the editors of Izote Vos explain
that the title of their anthology not only refers to the flor de izote, the
edible national flower of El Salvador, but also to something greater. In their
introduction, they write: “Vos in Salvadoran Spanish means ‘you,’ but also
conjures images of ‘voz . . . voice’” (Kim et al. 2000, 2). For Salvadorans,
to talk in voseo, then, is a marker of cultural identity, belonging, and community, even across their transnational migrations to the United States
and elsewhere.
The use or disuse of vos in Salvadoran American cultures may be read
consequently as a desire for and sign of belonging to, or of no longer strictly
and exclusively identifying with the national group because of migration, distance, or transculturation processes. When used by Salvadoran
Americans, the voseo often serves as a badge of cultural and linguistic
belonging and indigeneity, or reclaiming of Salvadoran cultural identity. In
CC’s Anthems, Noe commands his son Enrique to speak at least a proper
form of English since he appears not to speak Spanish: “Hablá inglés
[vos].” Voseando to this son, Noe implicitly hopes that Enrique will identify
and understand Salvadoran idiomatic and cultural nuances (202). Papá
Noe, thus, attempts to make an appeal lost on Enrique, who apparently
has lost the ability (or refuses) to vosear and to speak in the colloquial
variant of Salvadoran Spanish. Indeed, many one-and-half and second
generation Salvadoran Americans negotiate their use of the vos, signifying
thus the production of more hybridized languages and cultural identities
in the United States (Portes and Rumbaut 2001). Growing up in the United
States among English speakers and Spanish speakers from other nations
where the form tú or usted predominates, or in families where the tú and
usted are used to express respect, there is often little opportunity for generations raised in the United States to use the vos form and to conjugate
verbs for that familiar second-person singular pronoun. The loss or disuse
of vos for some Salvadoran Americans is very particular to the experience
of Salvadorans and other Central Americans and, perhaps, some South
Americans growing up in the United States. In my Salvadoran family, for
example, children always address their parents and elders in the respectful
usted. Communication in Spanish with other Latino/a peers, especially
Mexicans, usually requires the use of tú. Thus, my siblings and I, like other
one-and-half and successive generation Salvadorans, did not learn to
vosear in our daily communication. In this context I ponder if the disuse
of the Central American vos signifies a loss of Salvadoran identity, culture,
language, and homeland sensibilities and solidarity, as some would claim.
Does the disuse of vos mean that we are no longer Salvadoreños and
Salvadoreñas, but Salvadoran Americans who are losing the most essential
markers of Salvadoran identity, including Salvadoran customs, traditions,
and other forms of national identification? Or, does it signify the transnationalization of Salvadoran cultural identity into U.S. Latino/a identities,
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or what Flores and Yúdice (1990) call the transcreation of Latino/a languages and identities in the U.S. context? Further, does the negotiation of
vos/z announce the construction of hybridized Salvadoran identities made
possible outside of the national territory of El Salvador? In concluding my
line of interrogation, I ask why must this creative process of producing
new Salvadoreñidades in translocal sites outside of El Salvador be branded
as a loss rather than as a gain for El Salvador and the United States?
Conclusion: “Wachintonian” Salvadoran Bilingual Arts
Indeed, for some time now, Latino/a scholars have been arguing that
Spanish language maintenance under the weight of U.S. hegemonic culture and the uneasy transculturation of Spanish and English have generated some of the most creative and ambidextrous practices in the cultural
history of Latinos/as in the United States. Ed Morales (2002), Ana Celia
Zentella (1997), Rosaura Sánchez (1983), Fernando Peñalosa (1981), and
other scholars have posited that the hybridized Spanish spoken in the
United States breaks with linguistic rules and confines, and in its many
forms expresses a range of hybrid Latinidades. U.S. Latino/a writing
that comes out of this space of code-switching and cultural contact has
produced what Doris Sommer, in her book titled Bilingual Games: Some
Literary Investigations (2003), has called the “art of code-switching” by
bilingual artists and writers “overloaded” and overflowing with linguistic
and cultural codes (1). Latino/a cultural producers like Tato Laviera (1985;
2008) and Ed Morales, the artists affiliated with the Nuyorican Poets
Café and the Central American Epicentro spoken-word movements, and
Chicana writers like Gloria Anzaldúa (1987) and Margarita Cota-Cárdenas
(1985) have expressed themselves in the mixed language of Latino/a
AmeRíca, the greater Borderlands, and the transnationalized world.
Speaking further about the use of Spanish in his own U.S. Latino writings, the U.S.-Guatemalan writer Francisco Goldman points out that the
Spanish language may not be the primary marker of “Latino/a” identity,
especially for those living in between languages, cultures, and traditions.
He notes that “Spanish mixed with English is for many of us the language
of our homes, of our most exuberant and eloquent friendships and loves,
the language of the streets and many workplaces—not a separatist conceit, but like it or not, a living, breathing, ever-evolving new American
vernacular” (Goldman 1999, 8). Along these lines, Goldman, Avilés, and
others (including this writer) question whether speaking Spanish, or
not, makes you any more or less Latino/a in the United States. Who is
Latino/a or Hispanic, and what languages do Latinos/as speak? I would
further ask: How do we go beyond a classification system that reductively
identifies Latinos/as as “Spanish-speaking communities” or as extensions
of “Spanish-speaking countries,” as official demographic discourse stipulates in the United States? Finally, I ask: Is Spanish the de facto language
and essential marker of U.S. Latinos/as, be they of Dominican, Guatemalan,
Uruguayan, Salvadoran, Garifuna, Maya, or Aymara descent? Or is Spanish
just one of the many possible languages spoken by Salvadorans and other
Latinos/as in translocal sites such as Washington, DC?
In closing, Salvadoran American poet, Quique Avilés, master of bilingual arts in the District of Columbia, must have the last word. In his
poem titled “Spanglish Morongon” (2003, 16–17), Avilés’s narrator speaks
through omniscient Wachintonian espanglish voces that reverberate across
the (Latino) American city, otherwise known as Washington, DC. In
the figurative mobile space of a bus (the location of enunciation of his
poem), we hear the hybrid voices of people who are going places, thinking
about their day, and expressing personal concerns about their insurance,
Medicaid, employment, laundry, family, school, and the Saturday night
date. One bus rider ruminates, “Me subi en el bus que va para downtown /
pedi un transfer / sonrei con el bus driver / me sente all the way in the back
/ el pinche bus iba full / lleno de gente llendo al part time / medio mundo
hablando sobre insurance / los complaints y el medicaid” (16–17; notice
the code-switching, the lack of accent marks, and the use of “llendo”). The
in-transit and transient bus serves as a metaphor for the transnational city
in transformation. Changing at the rapid pace of the “transmigrations”
of peoples, the transnational city of Washington, DC, thus resonates with
uniquely “Wachingtonian” Salvadoran voices and identities produced
outside of El Salvador and in translocal sites across the United States and
elsewhere.
Notes
1. For a discussion of Salvadoran immigration and the geocultural and imaginary
configuration of the Salvadoran diaspora as “Departamento 15,” see Rodríguez
(2005).
2. Central American population counts in the United States vary widely. See PCT
19, Place of Birth for the Foreign-Born Population [126], Data Set: Census 2000
Summary File 3 (SF3), http://www.census.gov/ (accessed September, 20, 2002).
In January 2001, the Ministry of Exterior Relations in El Salvador reported large
numbers of Salvadoran immigrants: 800,000 Salvadorans in the Los Angeles
region, 450,000 in the San Francisco Bay Area, and 150,000 in the Washington,
DC, Metropolitan Area, http://www.rree.gob.sv/website/index.html (accessed
September, 20, 2002).
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3. In Waiting on Washington: Central American Workers in the Nation’s Capital
(1995), Terry A. Repak explains that Central American (Salvadoran) female
domestic workers and child-care providers, sponsored by diplomats, government employees, and international agencies, “pioneered the [Central American]
migration in the 1960s and 1970s, when the city still lacked a substantial Latin
American community and an international labor force” (2). In the 1980s and
1990s, the boom in regional construction, restaurant and hospitality businesses,
cleaning subcontractors, and other industries opened new labor markets holding steadfast into the new century. David E. Pedersen (1995) links the 1980s’
rise in service sector jobs and immigrant laborers in the region to the expansion
of the “U.S. military industrial complex” engaged in procuring and facilitating
services in defense, research and development, telecommunication, transportation, international trade, finance, and legal and political work. The availability of
employment and the demand for a low-wage labor force have historically drawn
to the region a large number of immigrants from Latin America and elsewhere
but particularly from Central America and El Salvador. Throughout the 1980s,
Central American immigrants fleeing civil wars in their countries were attracted
to the area by personal contacts, social networks, immigrant service agencies,
employment opportunities, affordable housing, and relatively easy access to jobs
in the District of Columbia and its suburbs. Subsequently the Salvadoran/Latino
population in DC grew, exacerbating tensions in an already racially stratified and
economically depressed city. On May 5, 1991, race riots broke out in the Latino
neighborhood of Mount Pleasant, causing great damage to property and injury
to people (Jennings and Lusane 1994). In the aftermath of the riots, businesses
reopened, churches, community centers, public clinics, and service providers
attended to immigrants’ needs, and a Latino festival was hosted as well in the
ethnically diverse Adams Morgan district. In Creating a Latino Identity in the
Nation’s Capital: The Latino Festival (1998), Olivia Cadaval discusses the emergence of a “multiethnic Latino community in Washington, D.C.,” in the wake of
the race riots of the 1960s and 1990s, the civil rights movement, and the severe
urban decline and renewal of DC. Migration to the suburbs in northern Virginia
and Maryland has since greatly expanded the reach of Latinos into the greater
Washington, DC, Metropolitan Area (Singer 2001; Singer et al. 2003). Salvadoran
and others from Latin America continue to gravitate to the region.
4. Lilo González y los de la Mount Pleasant compose and perform songs that
chronicle the lives and events of Latinos/as in the Mount Pleasant neighborhood of Washington, DC. Born in Armenia, El Salvador, González immigrated
to the United States in 1981, arriving in the Washington, DC, area, or, to be
more exact, the Columbia Heights and Mount Pleasant neighborhoods, after
which the group “Lilo González y los de la Mount Pleasant” is named. González
and his musical group have worked with the Latino community in Washington,
DC, playing a hybrid mix of folk music, cumbia, salsa, tango, and reggae at local
fund-raising events in the United States and El Salvador.
5. Quique Avilés is a local Washington, DC, Salvadoran poet, performance artist,
and community activist, who emigrated from El Salvador to Washington, DC,
as a child and grew up and attended schools in the Mount Pleasant neighborhood. In the late 1980s, Avilés cofounded and directed the theater collective
LatiNegro, which recruited local Latino and African American youths to perform in theaters, schools, prisons, universities, and communities. In 1999, he
cofounded Sol & Soul, a nonprofit arts organization, which continues the work
of LatiNegro in conducting workshops with young performers in the District
of Columbia, collaborating with community groups, and organizing theater
events in the District for local and visiting actors. Avilés continues to perform
his mixed-media work on and off stage, most recently writing, producing, and
acting in a piece called Caminata, a travel narrative about the immigrant life
of Salvadorans, Russians, Africans, Iraqis, and others whose lives intersect in
Washington, DC. Addressing issues of race, class, gender, and identity, among
other things, his performance pieces and poetry often incorporate life narratives, voices, and experiences of immigrants and everyday folk from the local
neighborhoods of Washington, DC.
References
Anzaldúa, Gloria. 1987. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. San Francisco:
Aunte Lute Press.
Avilés, Quique. 2003. The Immigrant Museum. México, D.F.: PinStudio & Raíces
de Papel.
Baker-Cristales, Beth. 2004. Salvadoran Migration to Southern California: Redefining
El Hermano Lejano. Gainesville: University Press of Florida.
Berlant, Lauren. 2002. The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essay on Sex
and Citizenship. Durham and London: Duke University Press.
Cadaval, Olivia. 1998. Creating a Latino Identity in the Nation’s Capital: The Latino
Festival. New York and London: Garland Publishing.
Cota-Cárdenas, Margarita. 1985. Puppet: A Chicano Novella. Austin: Relampago
Books Press.
Culture Clash. 2003. Anthems: Culture Clash in the District. In Culture Clash in
Americca: Four Plays, 151–221. New York: Theatre Communications Group, Inc.
Dalton, Roque. 1974/2000. Poema de amor. Las historias prohibidas del pulgarcito.
San Salvador, ES: Universidad Centroamericana José Simeón Cañas Editores.
Flores, Juan, and George Yúdice. 1990. Living Borders/Buscando América:
Language of Latino Self-formation. Social Text 8.24: 57–84.
Flores, William V., and Rina Benmayor, eds. 1997. Latino Cultural Citizenship:
Claiming Identity, Space, and Rights. Boston: Beacon Press.
García Bedolla, Lisa. 2003. The Identity Paradox: Latino Language, Politics and
Selective Dissociation. Latino Studies 1.2: 264–283.
Goldman, Francisco. 1999. State of the Art: Latino Writers. The Washington Post,
February 28, Book World, 1, 8–10.
González, Lilo y los de la Mt. Pleasant. 1994. Las historias prohibidas de Pedro y
Tyrone. A quien corresponda . . . [CD]. Washington, DC: LGP Records, LML2741.
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Hamilton, Nora, and Norma Stoltz Chinchilla. 2001. Seeking Community in a
Global City: Guatemalans and Salvadorans in Los Angeles. Philadelphia: Temple
University Press.
Jennings, Keith, and Clarence Lusane. 1994. The State and Future of Black/Latino
Relations in Washington, D.C.: A Bridge in Need of Repair. In Blacks, Latinos,
and Asians in Urban America: Status and Prospects for Politics and Activism, ed.
James Jennings, 57–77. Westport, CT: Praeger.
Kim, Katherine Cowy, Alfonso Serrano F., Leda Ramos, and Rick Rocamora, eds.
2000. Izote Vos: A Collection of Salvadoran American Writing and Visual Art.
San Francisco: Pacific News Service.
Laviera, Tato. 1985. AmeRícan. Houston: Arte Público Press.
———. 2008. Mixturao. Houston: Arte Público Press.
Mahler, Sarah J. 1995a. American Dreaming: Immigrant Life on the Margins.
Princeton: Princeton University Press.
———. 1995b. Salvadorans in Suburbia: Symbiosis and Conflict. Boston: Allyn and
Bacon.
———. 2000. Migration and Transnational Issues: Recent Trends and Prospects
for 2020. http://ca2020.fiu.edu/Themes/Sarah_Mahler/Mahler.htm. Accessed
July 8, 2009.
Mar-Molinero, Clare. 2000. The Politics of Language in the Spanish-Speaking World.
London and New York: Routledge.
Menjívar, Cecilia. 2000. Fragmented Ties: Salvadoran Immigrant Networks in America.
Morales, Ed. 2002. Living in Spanglish: The Search for Latino Identity in America.
New York: St. Martin’s Press.
Pedersen, David E. 1995. States of Memory and Desire: The Meaning of City
and Nation for Transnational Migrants in Washington, D.C. and El Salvador.
Amerikastudien/American Studies 40.3: 415–442.
———. 2002. The Storm We Call Dollars: Determining Value and Belief in
El Salvador and the United States. Cultural Anthropology 17.3: 431–459.
Peñalosa, Fernando. 1981. Some Issues in Chicano Sociolinguistics. In Latino
Language and Communicative Behavior, ed. Richard P. Durán, 3–18. Norwood,
NJ: ABLEX.
Portes, Alejandro, and Rubén G. Rumbaut. 2001. Legacies: The Story of the Immigrant
Second Generation. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Quesada Pacheco, Miguel Ángel. 2000. El español de América. Cartago: Editorial
Tecnológica de Costa Rica.
Repak, Terry A. 1995. Waiting on Washington: Central American Workers in the
Nation’s Capital. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
Rodríguez, Ana Patricia. 2005. “Departamento 15”: Cultural Narratives of Salvadoran
Transnational Migration. Latino Studies 3.1: 19–41.
Sánchez, Rosaura. 1983. Chicano Discourse: Socio-historic Perspectives. Rowley, MA:
Newbury House Publishers.
Sánchez Molina, Raúl. 2005. “Mandar a traer”: Antropología, migraciones y transnacionalismo: Salvadoreños en Washington. Madrid: Editorial Universitas.
Singer, Audrey. 2003. At Home in the Nation’s Capital: Immigrant Trends in
Metropolitan Washington. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution. http://www.
brookings.edu/es/urban/gwrp/publinks/2003/immigration.pdf. Accessed July 8,
2009.
Singer, Audrey, et al. 2001. The World in a Zip Code: Greater Washington, D.C. as
a New Region of Immigration. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution. http://
www.brookings.edu/es/urban/immigration/immigration.pdf. Accessed July 8,
2009.
Smith, Molly. 2003. Introduction to Anthems: Culture Clash in the District. In Culture
Clash in Americca: Four Plays, 153–155. New York: Theatre Communications
Group, Inc.
Sommer, Doris. 2003. Bilingual Games: Some Literary Investigations. London:
Palgrave.
Stewart, Miranda. 1999. The Spanish Language Today. London and New York:
Routledge.
U.S. Census Bureau. http://factfinder.census.gov/home/en/pldata.html.
Vaquero de Ramírez, María. 1998. El español de América II: Morfosintaxis y Léxico.
Madrid: Arco Libros.
Zentella, Ana Celia. 1997. Growing Up Bilingual. Malden: Blackwell.
220
The Final Frontier: Guillermo
Gómez-Peña’s The Great
Mojado Invasion
Catherine Leen
G
uillermo Gómez-Peña, who has been described as “without question
the best-known Latino, Chicano, Mexican performance artist in the
United States, Latin America, and the art world of the North Atlantic corridor,” is a transnational figure in terms of his biography and his work
(Mendieta 2003, 539). Gómez-Peña has forged a composite identity as
a Mexican-born artist who resides mainly in the United States and who
describes himself as a “Mexican in the process of Chicanoization” (2000,
21). His writings, performances, and filmic works, especially The Great
Mojado Invasion (The 2nd US-Mexico War [2001]), which will be the focus
of this chapter, seamlessly blend high and pop culture as he interrogates
notions of cultural belonging and exclusion. Together with his long-term
collaborators, Pocha Nostra, Gómez-Peña joins forces with performance
artists and activists across the globe, producing works that create new
spaces and communities through performances and Internet projects that
transcend easy categorization in terms of race, gender, and even species.
Given the fact that his own life has involved movements across borders of
different kinds that are mirrored in his artistic practice, transnationalism
provides a useful framework for the analysis of his work.
The use of the term transnationalism in close conjunction with globalization and internationalism means that it can be difficult to pinpoint its
meaning. Paul Hopper notes that although religious beliefs, trade links, and
diaspora communities predate globalization, transnationalism can be seen as
both a consequence of globalization and a tool that can be used to study it, as
12
CATHERINE LEEN
it addresses “the formation of new social spaces and new types of community
and forms of human interaction, as well as the adaptations to these developments that are taking place within specific contexts” (2007, 52). Conversely,
Saskia Sassen sees “economic, political, and cultural globalization as transnational processes” (2007, 1). Basch, Glick Schiller, and Szanton Blanc have
defined transnationalism as “the processes by which immigrants forge and
sustain multistranded social relations that link together their societies of
origin and settlement, and through which they create transnational social
fields that cross national borders” (qtd. in Kelly 2003, 210). The definition of
transnationalism is taken further by Wuthnow and Offutt, who argue that
border crossings are not a prerequisite for experiencing transnationalism:
People who are not themselves recent immigrants or located in diasporic
border towns are also influenced by globalization. They watch CNN, travel,
visit friends and relatives in other countries, work for multinational corporations, and purchase goods from abroad. They live in a world in which
transnationalism is very much present. If they are not themselves immigrants, they are increasingly involved in an economy based on transnational
flows of labor and capital.
(Wuthnow and Offutt 2008, 210)
Gómez-Peña’s work involves literal and metaphorical border crossings.
His exploration of transnationalism takes into account the interactions
between diverse communities that predate the nation-state era mentioned
by Mendieta, most notably through the use of language and religion as
metaphors of cultural exchange and transformation. The media through
which he constructs his works are also very significant. He uses video and
film, which have traditionally been the tools of a mainstream entertainment
industry centred in the United States, and the Internet, which provides the
type of virtual transnational space mentioned by Kelly. The use of the combination of these media in The Great Mojado Invasion is not incidental, for
Néstor García Canclini has noted that:
Donde se ve más efectiva la globalización es en el mundo audiovisual:
música, cine, televisión e informática están siendo reordenados . . . para ser
difundidos a todo el planeta. El sistema multimedia que parcialmente integra estos cuatro campos ofrece posibilidades inéditas de expansión transnacional aun en las culturas periféricas.
222
(García Canclini 2005, 15).1
This collision of mass-market global forces with the independent and
even anarchic possibilities of cyberspace was highlighted in a truly
223
unprecedented manner in 1994 when the North American Free Trade
Agreement (NAFTA) came into effect in Mexico. This trade agreement
between the United States and Mexico followed the pattern of other such
global alliances by subsuming Mexico’s economy, including its film industry, to North American multinationals. What was unique about the formal
implementation of the agreement was that it coincided with a deliberately timed protest by the Zapatista Army of National Liberation, which
underscored the gulf between those who sought to profit from globalization
and a subaltern sector of Mexican society that had been neglected and
oppressed for decades so that the “Mexican past had again become the
present” (Suchlicki 2008, 148). Not only was the Internet crucial in spreading the word of the Zapatista uprising but it was used to great effect by
Subcomandante Marcos to outline the group’s demands and philosophy.
Moreover, the government was powerless to contain the constant updates
on the struggle, which could be accessed from all over the world (Green
1997, 102).
Gómez-Peña’s 1990 work, Border Brujo, featured a transnational culture
clash similar to that between the premodern social position the Zapatistas
were forced into and the contemporary globalized world represented by
NAFTA. This video of a performance piece, made in collaboration with filmmaker Isaac Artenstein, casts Gómez-Peña as a postmodern shaman who has
the power to conjure a vertiginous range of identities, both through changes
in his own costume, voice, and attitudes and through the kaleidoscopic cultural symbols that adorn his chaotic altar. Claire F. Fox notes that the video
marked an important development in the artists’ work by moving away
from conceiving the border as a particular physical space to a “re-casting
of the border as a global and temporal zone” (1999, 130). What is most
striking about the piece is the constant shifting between not just Spanish
and English but between languages as diverse as French and Náhuatl and
even the simulated speaking in tongues. The work is also notable for the
direct and at times confrontational engagement with the audience, which
challenges them to consider their own prejudices, stereotypical views, and
fears about the Other. Fox also points out that “Gómez-Peña is not out to
destroy differences so much as he attempts to effect abrupt collisions among
various ‘subject positions,’ and to compel his audience to perform a similar
kind of ‘border crossing’” (1996, 233–234). The conflation of so many different visual images and voices amounts to a deconstruction of the idea of a
dominant culture, as all are given equal space and at times even overlap. This
inclusive approach also rejects clearly differentiated boundaries between
Mexican indigenous and Western cultures, creating a hybrid transnational
space where unexpected juxtapositions of disparate cultural symbols begin
to seem mundane.
THE FINAL FRONTIER
CATHERINE LEEN
The artist’s more recent filmic work, The Great Mojado Invasion, made
in collaboration with the filmmaker Gustavo Vasquez, is to some extent
a more straightforward piece in that it purports to be a documentary
about Chicano history. It is decidedly more narrative-driven than Border
Brujo, but its revisionist view of history leads to an imagined scenario in
which the Latino population dominates the United States. Furthermore,
the film’s use of clips from both mainstream and what could generously
be categorized as B-movies, predominantly low-budget Mexican sciencefiction movies, implicitly calls into question the sources on which any
historical account is based.
“Space: The Final Frontier,” the famous opening line of the voiceover
from the Star Trek series, could serve as an introduction to Gómez-Peña’s
frequent recourse to the science-fiction genre as a vehicle for exploring
racial conflicts in The Great Mojado Invasion. The artist has used sciencefiction characters on many occasions to communicate the sense of dislocation and marginalization he felt when he first came to live in California:
“We were the undisputed backbone of the economy and the omnipresent
bogeyman in the Anglo imagination. We were California’s romantic backdrop and favourite food, and at the same time we were its epic fear: a gallant mariachi morphing back and forth into Godzilla” (Gómez-Peña n.d.).
Doubtlessly, the marginal position of science fiction as a form that has
often been viewed as less than tasteful or acceptable as art would also have
appealed strongly to him. William Johnson observes that “although science
fiction writing has gained enormously in popularity and critical attention
in recent years, it is still not fully respectable,” and adds that “screen science
fiction is in an even more dubious position” (1972, 1). If science fiction
is considered a less than highbrow genre, paradoxically, it has occupied a
notable role in reflecting the fears and tensions of the societies it depicts:
Critical works have focused on the way in which SF and horror films
articulate an anxiety about progress, as well as social and cultural concerns
contemporary to the text, such as Cold-War narratives, race and gender
issues, and also the changing conception of humanness in a technological
environment.
(Wood 2002, 13–14)
224
Science-fiction films essentially mirror the concerns of contemporary
society, most often in terms of threats from other nations that are played
out in Outer Space or through tales of unwelcome invasions, but they
also articulate concerns closer to home, particularly racial ones. Charles
Ramírez Berg, in his study of the place of Hispanics in science-fiction
films, asserts that the stereotyping of Hispanics since the era of silent
225
cinema has led to a perceived need in contemporary cinema to eliminate
aliens either by returning them to their own planets or by destroying them
(2002, 158).
The strong association between Mexicans and aliens has led numerous
Chicano/a artists to explore the possibilities the stereotype offers. In their
1998 play Bordertown, theatre collective Culture Clash presents a scenario
in which heated discussions of the racial tensions between Mexicans and
Anglos are interrupted by the arrival of “an intense Bald Man wearing a
purple cosmic gown and Nike sneakers” (2003, 17). This figure exhorts
the humans he encounters to leave behind the physical and metaphorical
borders that separate them and encourages them to start a new life in a
“borderless cosmos, where race, creed and religion does not matter” (18).
The play concludes, after much fraught negotiation of identity politics
between a diverse cast of characters, with the reemergence of the Bald
Man, whose speech explicitly links Aztec cosmology with the promise of
an escape from ethnic divisions:
The New millennium marked the close of a major cycle and will initiate a
spiritual renaissance of logic and reason. The end of the millennium is also
the end of the Dark Ages, what the Aztecs call “El Quinto Sol.” As we enter
this new era, we must leave behind the negative feelings of our lower self.
The hatred, the fear, the unresolved conflicts. Our ancestors know of a place,
a place where there are no borders, only infinitesimal possibilities.
(Culture Clash 2003, 63)
The use of the present tense “know” in the final sentence is significant, for
it underlines the fact that Aztec wisdom is not something confined to history, but a living philosophy that illuminates a way forward by transcending racial boundaries and embracing the possibilities of the entire universe
through space travel. Space in this work is thus constructed as a utopian
alternative locale where borders are replaced by possibilities. On a far less
optimistic and frequently acerbic note, Los Angeles-based cartoonist Lalo
Alcaraz has made use of images of aliens to highlight the marginalization of Latino/as in U.S. society. A typical strip, titled “Alienated,” features
images of an extraterrestrial accompanied by the caption: “I don’t get it.
The government denies I exist . . . Hollywood vilifies me . . . Businesses
exploit me for profit . . . You’d think I was Latino!” (Alcaraz 2004, 81).
What is notable about Alcaraz’s work is his frequent use of the alienimmigrant association to underscore and question the strong link between
these terms that has largely been created by Hollywood filmmakers. One
such example is Barry Sonnenfeld’s 2002 Men in Black, which features a
scene where an extraterrestrial villain attempts to enter the United States
THE FINAL FRONTIER
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CATHERINE LEEN
The narrative trajectory of the . . . Superman series allows us, then, to see
a crucial immigrant/native trade-off. America will drop its isolationist barrier to get something uniquely valuable. The Alien, in exchange for their
acceptance, must do what generations of aliens have been called on to do
for centuries—assimilate.
(Ramírez Berg 2002, 167)
Gómez-Peña is at the forefront of artists who have long recognized the
potency of stereotypical visual representations of Latinos as aliens and
used them to great effect to examine the complexities and conflicts resulting from transnationalism. The diasporic communities described in neutral terms by theorists of transnationalism literally mutate in his work, as
Mexican Americans become threatening extraterrestrials or part-cyborg
creatures who threaten U.S. security and civilization, while at the same
time having an undeniable exotic appeal. Similarly, the calm discussion
of globalization and the media is problematized in his writings, films, and
performances by the questioning of hierarchies of film genres, with kitsch
Mexican B-movies being afforded the same authority as slick Hollywood
productions or earnest art films in The Great Mojado Invasion. This unveiling of the manipulative power of the mass media is accompanied by an
extremely inventive use of Internet-based media creations, so that the
globalization of the media is presented simultaneously as a hegemonic
force of global capitalism and a tool for protest and the presentation of
alternative perspectives. Moreover, the very presentation of transnational
processes in a seemingly detached, academic manner is parodied by his use
of popular culture, particularly science fiction, combined with an acerbic
sense of humour.
In his 1996 book Friendly Cannibals, Gómez-Peña presents Superman,
joined in one case by Captain America, repelling foreign invaders in the
form of Mexican pre-Columbian deities, thus conflating a U.S. popularculture icon with a pre-nation-state figure that represents an ancient and
profoundly religious culture. A similar image in the same book follows
Ramírez Berg’s description of the acceptable alien as Superman, clad in
cowboy garb, faces off against another pre-Columbian God. In both cases,
Superman, who in the second instance is made all the more human by
his cowboy outfit, is the defender of the U.S. nation against a far more
disguised as an undocumented Mexican. Ramírez Berg comments further
on this association is his discussion of Superman, whom he designates as
one of the few exceptions to the rule that aliens must be expelled from the
United States because of his exceptional talents, which benefit U.S. society
and thus allow him to be welcomed and naturalized:
227
pernicious alien threat than he himself represents, thus becoming a supernatural cowboy defeating marauding Indians. Gómez-Peña has also created
his own range of half-human, half-robot characters, which blend features
from famous science-fiction characters with Mexican traits. In Dangerous
Border Crossers: The Artist Talks Back, he introduces one such character, the
Mexterminator or El Mad Mex:
Features: Illegal border crosser and cultural invader, defender of immigrants’ rights, drug and jalapeño pusher, practices boxing, Tex Mex rock
and narcoshamanism, seduces gueras [blondes] and abducts innocent
Anglo children. Sponsored by the Gulf Cartel and the Zapatista movement.
Wanted by the DEA, the FBI, the INS and the Smithsonian Institution.
Indestructible!
(Gómez-Peña 2000, 44)
The Mexterminator is a futuristic, cyber creation who nonetheless conforms to the timeworn stereotype of a criminal Mexican, who crosses borders illegally, pushes drugs, and preys on Anglo women and children. Yet he
is also of interest to cultural historians and anthropologists, thus he clearly
has a desirable exoticism. Notably, he is explicitly linked to the Zapatistas,
thus suggesting the political power that can be channelled through the use
of the Internet. Most chilling from the point of view of mainstream society
is his unstoppable drive to disrupt U.S. social order, which is indicated not
only by his association with a drug cartel but through the superhuman
attributes his half-human, half-cyborg identity imply. His ruthlessness
and superhuman powers distinguish him from the usual derogatory but
essentially unthreatening stereotypes of Mexicans:
En Estados Unidos los estereotipos pasivos del “sleepy Mexcan,” el “greaser”
y la “border señorita” se descongelaron en la década de los ochenta. A partir
de la implementación (aún ilegal) de la propuesta 187 y la nueva fiebre
antiinmigrante surge el Nuevo estereotipo del Mexican: el recién nacido
robo-Mexican encarna los temores xenofóbicos de una sociedad exprimermundista (en proceso de tercermundización) y viene a reeemplazar al
formidable enemigo soviético debutando en la pantalla grande y en el Super
Nintendo II: Se trata del Mexterminator, alias el Mad Mex . . . Su siniestra
misión es ni más ni menos que la reconquista del suroeste de gringolandia;
y ni Stallone, ni Schwarzennegger, ni Pete Wilson lo pueden detener.
THE FINAL FRONTIER
(Gómez-Peña 2002, 104)2
Two other recurrent characters who share these superhuman qualities are
Super Pocho, played by Roberto Sifuentes, and El Aztec High-Tech, who
CATHERINE LEEN
appear in the performance piece the New World Border, which envisages a
future where: “The U.S.-Mexico border disappears, Spanglish becomes the
‘official’ language; the hybrid state is now a political reality; and the ethnic/
social pyramid has been turned upside down” (Gómez-Peña 2002, 44).
This vision of a future populated by cyber-enhanced Mexican superheroes
who relegate Anglo English speakers to a subaltern class is the realization of the fears provoked by literal and virtual transnational exchanges.
Gómez-Peña has pondered this role reversal between the power positions
of Mexicans or Mexican Americans and North Americans on numerous
occasions, but nowhere does the idea achieve such a dramatic enactment
as in The Great Mojado Invasion. This frenetically paced and frequently
hilarious film showcases Gómez-Peña’s unique ability to manipulate pop
cultural images and ideas into his work and recast them in such a way
as to make his audience consider serious issues related to transnational
conflict.
The film features Gómez-Peña as a narrator whose commentaries punctuate what purports to be a documentary about the second U.S.-Mexico
war, which is won this time by Mexico. It is divided into seven chapters that
span the period from before the arrival of the Spanish to the Americas to
the late twentieth century, thus charting the decline of the Mexican people
from an idyllic existence in pre-Columbian Mexico to the current disenfranchised state of their descendants. The ordered temporary progression
and use of the documentary genre belie the chaos that is unleashed by the
filmmakers. Dressed in a trilby hat, tie, shirt, and waistcoat, Gómez-Peña
reproduces the serious and formal look of the documentary expert spokesperson, although his words could not be less measured, and he is already
smoking and drinking beer. His intermingling of Spanish and English
points to the transnational nature of the piece, as it presents U.S.-Mexican
history from the perspective of the vanquished and in both languages, as
well as through the distinctive code switching associated with Chicano/a
culture. The liberal use of influences from myriad cultures is suggested
immediately after this address, as the phone number 1-800-369-VATO
appears on screen accompanied by jaunty Asian music and a voiceover
that is not translated. This scene fades to an image of naked mariachis
whose guitar playing is drowned out by a rousing science-fiction instrumental. The first real indication of how central humour will be to the film
comes after this, when a title announces: “Finally, the uncensored version
of the director’s cut of the Chicano sci-fi classic banned in 69 festivals.”
Thus far, the standard documentary device of the authoritative commentator, the use of what is presented as archival film footage, and the language of advertising have been parodied through the lurid presentation of
all of these elements in a way that highlights their artifice and undermines
228
THE FINAL FRONTIER
229
The people depicted in an “ethnographic film” are meant to be seen as
exotic, as people who until only too recently were categorized by science as
Savage and Primitive, of an earlier evolutionary stage in the overall history
of humankind: people without history, without writing, without civilization, without technology, without archives.
(Rony 1996, 7)
By taking on the role of narrator, Gómez-Peña makes it clear that his is a
history of the Mexican and Chicano people told from a Mexican perspective. Moreover, his use of rarely identified, B-movie footage as his archives
playfully suggests the shortcomings of this approach, which depends on
the privileging of certain sources of information over others. The betterknown films he includes often feature ethnic groups seen through the
eyes of Westerners, such as the infamous Dances with Wolves, whose sympathetic view of Native Americans is fundamentally undermined by the
casting of Kevin Costner as a white man who becomes an accepted member of a Sioux tribe. Jon Landis’s The Three Amigos, while to some extent
successful in parodying the U.S.-centered approach to Mexico embodied
in the film it satirizes, The Magnificent Seven, ultimately still portrays the
U.S characters as superior to the hapless Mexicans they save. Even Nicolás
Echeverría’s much-praised Cabeza de Vaca does not escape parody, this
time for its overly earnest anthropological approach, which despite its
focus on a case where the conquerors become the conquered still has the
Western characters as the protagonists. The use of documentary elements
here also follows on from Third Cinema in its irreverent attitude to the
genre and the use of it as a starting point for a highly inventive transnational cinematic portrayal of history in a manner akin to that described
by Ana M. López:
[A]lthough the New Latin American Cinema has activated almost every
mode, genre and style of cinematic production, documentary realism—as
transformed by different contextual pressures—has served as a springboard
for the movement’s transformation and retheorizing of the cinematic
apparatus and its social functions. Eschewing the traditional distinctions
between documentary and fictional modes of filmmaking in its search to
produce a “new” cinema with a renewed social function, the New Latin
American Cinema has questioned, juxtaposed, transposed, and, ultimately
the claim of documentary to present an objective, unmediated truth. This
foregrounding of the apparatus of the film also underscores the fact that
all too often people of color are presented by white filmmakers as an exotic
but primitive other unable to tell their own stories:
230
CATHERINE LEEN
transformed each mode so that their various ontological and epistemological
claims are mediated by the forces of past and present historical contexts.
The New Latin American Cinema, itself an extremely diverse movement,
was a key influence on early Chicano filmmaking in its insistence on the
making of formally and thematically radical films. This influence is suggested in the fact that Francisco X. Camplis’s key early essay “Towards
the Development of a Raza Cinema” cites Fernando Solanas and Octavio
Getino’s seminal essay “Toward a Third Cinema” (Camplis 1992). The
films included in The Great Mojado Invasion, especially Cabeza de Vaca,
emulate this formal experimentation but insistently present events from
the point of view of the dominant Western culture.
The first radical departure from the realism so often taken for granted
as part of documentary occurs in Chapter Two, when science fiction
emerges as a major element in the film. The conquistadors are introduced as Euro-Aliens by means of a shot of Spanish galleons arriving in
Hispanola, which is preceded by one of Godzilla emerging from the sea.
Gómez-Peña’s voiceover further emphasizes the idea of the Spanish as the
original undocumented immigrants: “One day the first illegal aliens began
to arrive in the tropical shores of our still unnamed country.” Chapter Five
develops the science-fiction elements of the film further, adding credence
to the idea that Mexicans are indeed not just outsiders but extraterrestrials.
Here, the voiceover tells us that:
By the early 1990s, U.S. dictator Jorge Bush began to figure it out. Yes, the
art world was a cover-up for anti-American radicals. Yes, there was an occult
cofradie of people of color holding undeserved positions of power and yes,
there was in fact a Chicano-Mexicano conspiracy y para acabar de joder [to
stop fucking around] the Mexicans were, yes, we were aliens, extra-extraterrestres. We had an extra gene with the enigmatic name of X-209.
The apparent revelation that Mexicans are creatures from another planet
is intensified by the accompanying images of government agents, El Aztec
High Tech, and a Mexican man and woman morphing back and forth
from alien to human forms. The film goes on to conflate images of Mexican
sombreros with flying saucers and to suggest that, like El Mad Mex, these
creatures were predatory and dangerous and had to be targeted by a special FBI task force, as the voiceover explains: “The FBI created an especial
archive strictly for cases of abduction of rural housewives by Mexican
nationals. It was called ni más ni menos que (no more and no less than)
the Mex files.”
(López 1990, 404)
231
Gómez-Peña’s deliberately absurd rewriting of history presents as fact
the idea that Mexicans are extraterrestrials infiltrating North American
society and politics. It takes the science-fiction stereotype of the alien to
its logical extreme—if Mexicans are indeed aliens, then they are threatening, monstrous figures who represent the fears of a society where clear-cut
identities are already being erased by transnational encounters and cyberspace. By embracing this ludicrous idea of Mexicans as extraterrestrials
and turning it into a pseudo-historical account, he robs it of its potency
and exposes its absurdity. Despite the reversal of roles in the film, the newly
dominant position of Chicano/as is not a positive development, however,
for as Chapter Seven reveals, under the leader Gran Vato, the new Mexican
and Chicano elite behave as badly toward Anglos as they themselves were
previously treated. The voiceover explains:
By late ’99, gringos had been reduced to nomadic minorities derogatively
called Waspbacks. After the signing of the Guadalupe Marcos treaty, they
began to cross illegally the new border . . . to work for fast-food taquerías
for less than 200 pesos an hour. The civil, labor and sexual rights of these
downtrodden minorities were constantly violated and there was no embassy
to defend them. Those who chose to stay in the U.S. of Aztlán, meaning on
this side of the border, were forced to live underground, their language,
el inglés, was outlawed by the controversial PROP 69 y por debajo [and
lower down].
Not only are the rights of Anglos utterly abused in this new world order,
but they are misrepresented by the media and, like Mexicans and Mexican
Americans before them, subjected to a derogatory stereotyping described
as follows in the voiceover: “The hegemonic Chicano mass media began to
portray them, Anglos, as socially impaired, culturally alienated and prone
to unnecessary violence.” Ultimately, the now extremely drunk narrator
is forced to acknowledge that merely swapping roles and becoming the
oppressor rather than the oppressed, achieves nothing:
Can you pinche believe it? Soon it became clear that the new Revolutionjunta was—¡ay, me duele decirlo! [Oh! It pains me to say it!]—reproducing
the same behavior and patterns of the old order. And something had to be
done. So, so many of us decided to go underground once again and form
the new hybrid militia to oppose the reverse authoritarianism of the new
regime.
THE FINAL FRONTIER
Cutting to a clip of a Mexican wrestler mask, the film ends with an image
of Zorro, escaping capture once more and riding off into the horizon with
a cheery salute to his adoring public.
CATHERINE LEEN
The hilarious montage of clips used throughout The Great Mojado
Invasion ultimately leads to a cultural flattening, so that the boundaries
between mainstream films, such as Dances with Wolves, and B-movies,
such as unnamed Mexican vampire films, become blurred, especially as the
film is punctuated by appearances from Gómez-Peña’s own science-fiction
creations, El Mad Mex and El Aztec High Tech. The fact that the so-called
archival footage is from Mexican, U.S., and other sources also avoids the
polarization of the two nations and opens the discussion of racism and
social inequality to extend beyond the either/or proposition that is seen
to be the failure of the new Chicano regime, which merely replaces one
hegemony with another. Finally, the manipulation of film and computer
technology by the filmmakers calls into question the idea of Mexicans as a
primitive, backward people while at the same time underlining the pervasive and damaging manipulation of racial issues by a sensationalist mass
media. There is also a distinct echo here of the use of Internet technology
by the Zapatistas to confront encroaching globalization by powerful multinational firms. The fact that the pseudo-documentary is narrated and
indeed compiled by Gómez-Peña, aided by his cyber creations, points to
the possibilities offered by technology as perhaps the ultimate egalitarian
border-crossing device. In the end, what is most successful about the film
is its ability to make thought-provoking and insightful arguments about
injustice, racial stereotypes, and the abuse of power through a hybrid mix
of science fiction and documentary that never ceases to be entertaining.
In this acknowledgement of the power of humor, Gómez-Peña’s most
important precursor is perhaps Cheech Marin, who pioneered the use of
self-directed stereotyping in his Cheech and Chong films, and in the classic
comedy Born in East L.A. Marin has commented on the unique potential
of humor to communicate a social message in an appealing way:
I believe that important subjects can be dealt with as entertainment . . .
throughout film history, comedians have often been the first ones to bring
issues to the public. Underneath that mask of humor, a lot of comedians are
moralists, because it’s easier to get somebody to look at a problem is they
can laugh first and think later.
(qtd. in West and Crowdus 1988, 38)
232
Gómez-Peña clearly follows this approach, and he is also acutely aware of
reaching a North American public by recycling their popular cultural references in a way that may be amusing but is also unsettling. When asked by
Latino philosopher Eduardo Mendieta about how he reacts to the way in
which the cooption of Latino images by a global media creates stereotypes
that are far removed from the reality of Latino experience, he comments
THE FINAL FRONTIER
233
How do we continue raising crucial issues without scaring the audiences
or without facing deportation back to the margins? My answer, for the
moment, is that we must mimic mainstream culture, and when the mirror
is standing between them and us, reflecting their fantasies and desires, we
break it in the audience’s faces. If parts of the mirror get in their eyes, that’s
their problem.
(Mendieta 2003, 549)
Essentially, his use of so many transnational cultural references that would
be familiar to North American audiences lulls them into a false sense of
security before exposing them to a recasting of these well-known characters and scenarios in an outrageous rewriting of history that may be
amusing but is also profoundly disturbing. This confrontational attitude
toward the audience recalls the challenges put to the audience of Border
Brujo, though The Great Mojado Invasion develops this challenge further.
As Fox notes, Border Brujo is not a particularly innovative piece formally,
as it “privileges documentation of Gómez-Peña’s performance over experimentation with the video medium itself ” (1999, 123). The Great Mojado
Invasion mixes mainstream and low-budget films with performance and
cyber characters created on the Internet so that the idea of borders between
media are blurred and even erased, thus creating not only a deeply revisionist history of the place of Chicano/as in U.S. culture but also pointing
to the radical transformative effects of technology and communications.
This transformation will not be painless, however, as the reference to the
shards of mirror in the viewers’ eyes suggests, but it will certainly force the
dominant culture to address the uncomfortable aspects of the reflection it
contemplates and acknowledge the presence of alternative cultures whose
creative use of transnational communications devices has secured them a
place beyond the margins.
Notes
that the real challenge he and other artists face is reconciling the tension
between reaching and alienating mainstream audiences:
1. “Globalization is most effectively seen in the audiovisual world: music, cinema,
television and computers are being reordered . . . so that they are disseminated
to the entire planet. The multimedia system that partially integrates these four
fields offers unprecedented possibilities for transnational expansion in even
peripheral cultures” (my translation).
2. “In the United States, the passive stereotypes of the sleepy Mexican, the greaser
and the border vixen were defrosted in the decade of the 1980s. Since the (still
CATHERINE LEEN
illegal) implementation of Proposition 187 and the new anti-immigrant fever,
a new stereotype of the Mexican has emerged: the recently born robo-Mexican
embodies the xenophobic fears of a formerly First World society (in the process
of becoming the Third World) and this new stereotype has come to replace the
formidable Soviet enemy on the big screen and on Super Nintendo II. This new
stereotype is the Mexterminator, alias Mad Mex . . . His sinister mission involves
no more and no less than the re-conquest of the Southeast of the United States,
and no one—not Stallone, not Schwarzennegger, not Pete Wilson—can stop
him” (my translation).
References
Alcaraz, Lalo. 2004. Migra Mouse: Political Cartoons on Immigration. New York:
RDV Books.
Camplis, Francisco X. 1992. Towards the Development of a Raza Cinema (1975).
In Chicanos and Film: Representation and Resistance, ed. Chon A. Noriega,
284–303. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Culture Clash. 2003. Bordertown. New York: Theatre Communications Group.
Fox, Claire F. 1999. The Fence and the River: Culture and Politics at the U.S.-Mexico
Border. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Fox, Claire F. 1996. Mass Media, Site Specificity, and the U.S.-Mexico Border:
Guillermo Gómez-Peña’s Border Brujo (1988, 1990). In The Ethnic Eye: Latino
Media Arts, ed. Chon A. Noriega and Ana M. López, 228–244. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press.
García Canclini, Néstor. 2005. La globalización imaginada. Buenos Aires: Editorial
Piadós.
Gómez-Peña, Guillermo. 2002. El Mexterminator: Antropología inversa de un performancero postmexicano. Mexico: Editorial Océano de México.
Gómez-Peña, Guillermo. 2000. Dangerous Border Crossings: The Artist Talks Back.
New York: Routledge.
Gómez-Peña, Guillermo. n.d. On the Other Side of the Mexican Mirror. http://
www.pochanostra.com/antes/jazz_pocha2/mainpages/otherside.htm (accessed
September 2, 2008).
Green, Duncan. 1997. Faces of Latin America. London: Latin American Bureau.
Hopper, Paul. 2007. Understanding Cultural Globalization. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Johnson, William. 1972. Focus on the Science Fiction Film. New Jersey: Prentice Hall.
López, Ana M. 1990. At the Limits of Documentary: Hypertextual Transformation
and the New Latin American Cinema. In The Social Documentary in Latin
America, ed. Julianne Burton, 403–432. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh
Press.
Kelly, Philip. 2003. Canadian-Asian Transnationalism. The Canadian Geographer
3: 209–218.
Mendieta, Eduardo. 2003. A Latino Philosopher Interviews a Chicano Performance
Artist: Eduardo Mendieta and Gómez-Peña. Neplanta: Views from South 2.3:
539–554.
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Ramírez Berg, Charles. 2002. Latino Images in Film: Stereotypes, Subversion and
Resistance. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Rony, Fatimah Tobing. 1996. The Third Eye: Race Cinema, and Ethnographic Spectacle.
Sassen, Saskia, ed. 2007. Deciphering the Global: Its Scales, Spaces and Subjects.
New York: Routledge.
Suchlicki, Jaime. 2008. Mexico: From Montezuma to the Rise of the PAN. Virginia:
Potomac Books.
West, Dennis, and Crowdus, Gary. 1988. Cheech Cleans up His Act: An Interview
with Richard ‘Cheech’ Marin. Cineaste 16.3: 34–47.
Wood, Alylish. 2002. Technoscience in Contemporary American Film: Beyond Science
Fiction. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Wuthnow, Robert, and Offutt, Stephen. 2008. Transnational Religious Connections.
Sociology of Religion 69.2: 209–232.
THE FINAL FRONTIER
Writing the Haitian Diaspora:
The Transnational Contexts of
Edwidge Danticat’s
The Dew Breaker
Ricardo L. Ortíz
We are a people living through the tragedy of its survival. We’ve had to
hide, we’ve had to lock ourselves up inside ourselves, we’ve had to keep
ourselves to ourselves to resist the state. It is this situation, above all, that
has kept us strong and kept us coherent. But, after a while, such a people
understood that, if it went on locking itself up, it would die. So, it chose
to leave. It was the leave-taking of a few in order to prevent the asphyxiation of all.
(Yanick Lahens, quoted by Zimra, 1993, 91)
I tell lies for a living.
(Edwidge Danticat, Voices video series, 2004)
1. A Chronicle of a Death
13
In a May 2008 investigative series published in four installments in
the Washington Post, reporters Dana Priest and Amy Goldstein uncovered what they called the “unseen network of special prisons for foreign detainees” scattered across the United States, and into which “[s]
ome 33,000 people are crammed . . . on [any] given day, waiting to be
deported or for a judge to let them stay” in the country. The series of
reports, which devotes considerable attention to a roster of detailed case
RICARDO L. ORTÍZ
studies charting abuses of both physically and mentally ill detainees,
many of whom die while in detention, purports thereby to put a human
face on what it more generally calls “the human cost of increasingly
strict policies in the post−September 11 United States and [the] lack of
preparation for the implementation of those policies.” In the case of this
network of shadowy detention centers, Priest and Goldstein suggest, the
problem started with the conversion of the former federal Immigration
and Naturalization Service into what we now call the Immigration and
Customs Enforcement Bureau, which in turn is now subsumed into the
Department of Homeland Security. According to the reporters, detention
in the system, which can often result from simple misunderstandings
about a given detainee’s immigration status, can turn out to be a death
sentence for anyone unlucky enough to find themselves held while also
suffering from serious medical conditions that the staffs in many of the
system’s facilities are neither trained nor equipped to handle. “A system
set up for quick stays,” the reporters tell us, “has turned into a de facto
long-term care center for the most troublesome [often mentally ill]
patients, those whose countries of origin refused to take them.”
One of the more prominently featured case studies in the report is
the death in detention, in the fall of 2004, of Joseph Dantica, the elderly,
infirm uncle of Haitian American fiction writer Edwidge Danticat. Joseph
Dantica had just entered the United States through Miami with a legal visa,
but his fear that his life would still be in danger if he were to return to Haiti
too soon compelled him to ask for asylum, which in turn required that he
surrender himself to immigration authorities at Miami’s notorious Krome
Service Processing Center. At a preliminary interview with Krome authorities and his appointed attorney, Dantica began to convulse, and to vomit,
likely as a result of having his prescribed medications withheld from him
according to Krome policies; initially, the authorities present at the interview thought Dantica was faking his seizures, and thus delayed getting
him the help he needed. Dantica died a day after this incident, at Miami’s
Jackson Memorial Hospital, shackled (Priest and Goldstein recount) to a
bed, and without his family around him. Alongside the series of articles,
the Post website also features a collection of family photographs provided
for them by Dantica’s niece Edwidge, as well as both audio files of the
writer Danticat’s own account of the appalling series of events resulting
in her beloved uncle’s death, and a video file of a 60 Minutes companion
piece reported by Scott Pelley and also including a tearful interview with
Edwidge. This collection of journalistic and documentary materials in
turn follows roughly six months after the writer Danticat’s own celebrated
memoir of the tragic events of that year, Brother, I’m Dying, which was
published in late 2007.
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239
The following discussion focuses primarily on the work Danticat herself was doing in 2004, which was simultaneously and coincidentally also
the year of the bicentennial of the Haitian Revolution of 1804 and the year
that saw the ouster of Jean-Bertrand Aristide from both the presidency of
Haiti, and Haitian territory itself, as the result a very badly managed and
(according to varying accounts) either a U.S.-instigated, or at least U.S.tolerated, coup. In the spring of that year Danticat published The Dew
Breaker, a critically acclaimed work of narrative fiction that, depending on
the critic, operates either as a very disjointed but nonetheless coherentenough novel, or a loosely but significantly connected collection of stories
approaching but not quite attaining the status of a novel, about the legacies
of extreme political, mostly state-sponsored, violence during the Duvalier
years (but especially 1967 to 2004) in both Haiti itself and in the mostly
U.S.-based Haitian diaspora. In the spring of that year, Danticat also
received executive producer status for The Agronomist, director Jonathan
Demme’s documentary of the life and death of Jean Dominique, the
Haitian radio broadcaster and political activist. And in the early summer
of that year Danticat was herself the subject of an hour-long interview,
broadcast then on University of California Television (UCTV) and conducted by Marlene-Racine Toussaint, the president of the Multicultural
Women’s Press, and produced in conjunction with Danticat’s tenure as a
Regents’ Lecturer in the Department of Black Studies at the University of
California, Santa Barbara.
That interview is both telling and, as it concludes, rather chilling in
the way that it both articulates the depth and intensity of Danticat’s sense
of her own and her work’s situation in an evolving, challenging, and ever
more complex transnational context, but also in the way it evinces the
simultaneous and inextricable coinstantiation of the spatial and temporal
dimensions of that context. While Danticat herself seems at many points
in the interview acutely aware of the inextricability of the temporal and
spatial coordinates of the transnational (in this case, though not exactly
synonymously, diasporic) condition, what strikes any viewer watching the
video is the tragic irony, especially at the interview’s concluding moments,
of the writer’s not knowing then what horror would befall her family,
and what challenge would be posed to her imagination, next. On the
more obvious level, much of the interview is taken up with the familiar
representational concerns of identitarian political and cultural theory.
Toussaint, the interviewer, often regales Danticat with praise for her wellearned success as a writer, calling her at one point “one of Haiti’s most distinguished ambassadors,” to which Danticat replies that such a burden of
representation feels to her like a presumptive facet of life in the diaspora;
Danticat’s own mother, the writer confesses, had admonished her young
WRITING THE HAITIAN DIASPORA
RICARDO L. ORTÍZ
daughter during those early years in the diaspora, “When you leave this
house, you represent Haiti.” But for all these references to the more readily
legible spatial qualities of transnational, diasporic displacement, Danticat
herself is always quick in the interview to bring the discussion back to the
matter of diasporic time, and to its rather vexed operations of rupture,
elision, and vulnerable if resilient continuity. For example, when asked
whom she imagines as her key audience, Danticat responds that it’s herself
at fifteen, the young girl growing into her diasporic life and subjectivity,
the only girl in a family of five siblings, with two brothers born in the
homeland and two others born outside of it. She goes from there to invoking her recently born niece Zora (named after the African American writer
Zora Neale Hurston), whom she calls her family’s “first American child.”
The interview moves toward its conclusion with Danticat’s expression
that the diaspora for which she’s been so forcefully interpellated to do her
“ambassadorial,” diplomatic work will succeed in its function as a kind of
“bridge,” as she calls it, for the homeland, and again not as a conventional
bridge across spaces, but one that reaches across time, from, for example,
Haiti’s storied, heroic past (marked that year by what she herself terms its
“bittersweet bicentennial”) to a future that might be built in part on the
commitment U.S.-based Haitians make to rebuild the home country with
the wealth and skills acquired via success in the diaspora.
No viewer of the 2004 videotaped interview can miss, however, the
irony of what will happen just months after the taping; Toussaint concludes by asking Danticat what she expects to write next, and the writer
responds with a characteristic answer about the mystery of the creative
process and how for her that process depends in part on the voices (mostly
Haitian, and ancestral) that guide her in the production of her imaginative
work. What many readers will know from 2007 on is the tragedy of her
uncle’s death in the fall following this interview, a death which Danticat
herself goes on to describe in her 2007 memoir, and which Priest and
Goldstein further document and contextualize in their Post series of early
2008. That series of reports also underscores in some of its language that
fraught interaction between time and space in the post-9/11 transnational
context. Priest and Goldstein at one point describe these detention centers
generally as “way stations between life in and outside the United States,”
but in the context of their larger report’s focus on the extreme failure of
medical care in those centers, it is clear that they operate as meaningfully
as “way stations between life and death,” and that the mechanisms of legal,
political, and institutional “detention” at work in these centers result in
profoundly troubling suspensions of not merely the orderly, legally sanctioned, and just movement across national spaces but also what we too
often take for granted as the orderly (and not violently forced) movement
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from “this (existential) world” into “the next.” These more profound existential (some might say bio-political) dimensions and consequences of
this relatively recent modification in U.S. immigration policy and practice
takes on in the Post writers’ hands a kind of discursive kinship with familiar
symbolic renderings of Wasteland America. These “way stations,” they tell
us, “are mostly out of sight: in deserts and industrial warehouse districts,
in sequestered valleys next to other prisons, or near noisy airports.”1
Miami’s Krome Center, where Joseph Dantica found himself so detained
in the fall of 2004, most nearly qualifies as one of these last, a “way station” that served for him as an unwelcome threshold into his next life, but
one situated in that most paradoxical of spaces, “out of sight” by virtue of
its embedded location at the “noisy” heart of the post-9/11 transnational
matrix, in this instance represented by that node of human, material,
and symbolic transnational traffic, Miami, Florida, USA. Even before this
tragic turn in the story of her family’s life, however, Danticat the writer had
herself already suggested in 2004 that she was of at least two minds about
the possibilities of justice in the transnational context she mostly marks as
positive in the interview with Marlene Toussaint. While that interview only
briefly covers the publication of The Dew Breaker that year, other interviews she conducted while on tour to promote the book suggest that she
derived her inspiration to write it from a much more profoundly ambivalent, vexed sense of how life under the sign of post-9/11 transnationalism (and perhaps its subset, diaspora) compels the proliferation, and the
opening, of additional questions regarding the movements of individuals
and populations across national and other spaces and across moments in
a temporal unfolding increasingly resistant to the law, and the authority, of
neat narrative (and biographical, and historiographical) lines.
The rest of this discussion will focus even more exclusively on the
moment of The Dew Breaker’s appearance in the spring of 2004 and
what that moment can tell us about the evolution of the simultaneously
imaginative and critical deployments of diasporic, transnational life in
Danticat’s major literary fiction. To this end, the discussion engages quite
directly the analysis of transnationalism proferred by Laura Briggs, Gladys
McCormick, and J. T. Way in the Fall 2008 issue of American Quarterly.
There Briggs et al. observe that, especially for scholarship that takes as its
field of practice the areas where culture, politics, and economy interimplicate one another in ways that exceed and resist the conceptual and practical
frame of the nation-state, “transnationalism . . . provide[s] the conceptual
acid that denaturalizes all deployments” of the concept of the nation,
“compelling us to acknowledge that the nation . . . is a thing contested,
interrupted, and always shot through with contradiction” (627–628). That
analytical “acid,” as productive as it corrosive, insists (they tell us) that “the
RICARDO L. ORTÍZ
nation itself has to be a question . . . an ideology that changes over time,
and whose precise elaboration at any point has profound effects on wars,
economies, cultures, the movement of people, and relations of domination” (628). As this opening on the topic of Joseph Dantica’s death, and as
the following discussion of his niece’s imaginative project in the months
before that death will both make clear, Edwidge Danticat has always been
quite acutely and critically aware of at least one of the dimensions of
transnational life that Briggs et al. underscore in the course of their analysis; that is, that “the family is as flexibly [and vulnerably?] transnational a
space as any other” and that it, like “economics, politics [and] subjectification . . . exceed[s] the nation, and [thereby] offer[s] points of entry into
transnational analysis” (642).
2. A Catalog of Atrocities
It is a rather striking historical coincidence that, in the same period during which Haiti suffered its most recent set of major political upheavals,
perhaps the most prominent person of Haitian descent living in the United
States, the novelist Edwidge Danticat, found herself publishing (and touring to promote) her latest major work of fiction. The significance of the
coincidence was certainly reinforced by the explicitly political concerns
of that work; The Dew Breaker, Danticat’s third novel, tells the story of a
nameless man who emigrates from Haiti to New York City to escape his
own sordid past, not only as a tonton macoute in the service of François
Duvalier, but as one of the Haitian dictator’s most brutal torturers of political prisoners. While much has changed in Haiti since the elder Duvalier’s
1960s-era reign of bloody domination, Danticat’s beleaguered country still
seems to have bought every improvement or advance of its political system
at the cost of an endless and consistently brutal cycle of vengeance against
those formerly in power, or in favor, and either manipulation or intimidation of the entire populace whenever it appears on the verge of realizing
any degree of genuine democratic enfranchisement. While the longevity of
this cycle may perhaps be due to more than the legacy of the two Duvalier
regimes, which together held Haiti in thrall from the late 1950s through the
mid-1980s, nevertheless, that legacy bears much of the responsibility for it,
and for this reason Danticat’s novel bears a direct relevance to events still
unfolding today, both in Haiti itself and in the Haitian diaspora that has
mostly concentrated itself in the United States, specifically in New York City
(where the young Danticat settled with her parents, and where she has her
fictional “dew breaker” go) and in Miami (where Danticat currently lives).
Danticat herself was in 2004 understandably cagey, reticent even, in her
most public statements concerning Haiti’s most recent unrest. “My best
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reaction [to historical events] is my fiction,” she said in another interview
that year, “and that takes some time, and reflection, and nuance . . . The
[current] situation is so complicated anyway, and I don’t have the luxury
of declaring somebody totally evil, or . . . totally saintly . . . so I say I don’t
know” (Barnes 2004). One cannot fault Danticat for refusing to comment
more definitively on Haitian affairs of the moment, and it makes no sense
to assign this refusal either to fear, or to bad faith, on the writer’s part.
Beyond showcasing her extraordinary gifts as a writer and as a storyteller,
Danticat’s previous work had already demonstrated both her fearlessness
in confronting difficult issues relating to Haitian history and culture, and
her very genuine concern for her people, a concern that in part drives her
to have devoted all her fictional work to date to representing aspects of the
Haitian experience, if primarily to an Anglophone North American reading audience that would otherwise know pathetically little (and understand even less) about Haiti, and certainly about the very complicated
history that implicates the United States in almost every aspect of Haitian
life, both on and off the island, well into the first decade of the twentyfirst century. Danticat, born in Haiti during the first Duvalier regime in
1969, followed her parents to New York when she was twelve, having spent
most of her childhood in Haiti under the second Duvalier regime and in
the care of her uncle Joseph (a minister in the Bel-Air quarter of Port-auPrince) and her aunt Denise. Her American life has been nothing short of
prodigious: six years after arriving in the United States knowing almost no
English, she earned admission to Barnard College in New York City, where
she majored in French Literature; after earning her BA from Barnard she
entered the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Brown University; while
at Brown she submitted her MFA thesis, the novel Breath, Eyes, Memory,
to the Soho Press, which published it in 1994; thanks in part to Oprah
Winfrey’s sponsorship, Breath became a bestseller, and in very quick
succession Danticat published Krik? Krak! (a collection of short stories,
nominated for a National Book Award) in 1996, and The Farming of Bones
(her American Book Award–winning second novel, set during the 1937
massacre of Haitian sugar workers in the Dominican Republic) in 1998.2
She published no major fiction between 1998 and 2004, but she did manage to edit two published anthologies, as well as to write, and publish, both
a book on the annual Carnival celebration in the southern Haitian town of
Jacmel, and even a piece of young adult fiction.3
Haiti, its people, and their increasing extension into diasporic and
transnational life, remain the consistent topics and themes of almost
everything Danticat has published; they certainly command the attention
of her three novels, each of which revolves around some particular aspect
of Haitian and Haitian-diasporic life in the twentieth century, and while
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the novels vary significantly in their degrees of emphasis on the individual
versus the collective (or the personal versus the political) dimensions of
experience, in not one of them does Danticat fail to demonstrate how
one is necessarily incomprehensible without the other. Her two earlier
novels, for example, appear on the surface to divide the labor of representing personal and political life quite distinctly between them: Breath, Eyes,
Memory devotes its deceptively modest narrative to the intimate ties linking four generations of women in one family, focusing primarily on young
Sophie Caco’s difficult passage from Haiti to the United States, and from
childhood to adulthood; The Farming of Bones takes on the seemingly far
more ambitious task of rendering in fictional form the much larger, and
more populated, historical tragedy of the 1937 massacre of perhaps tens
of thousands of Haitians at the hands of the Dominican precursor to the
Duvaliers, Rafael Trujillo. But just as Danticat’s account of the intimate
lives of the Caco women in Breath resolves itself in the politically charged
revelation that the brutal rape of Martine, Sophie’s mother, by a macoute
in Duvalier’s Haiti results in Martine’s pregnancy with Sophie, so does her
account of the very public nature of the 1937 massacre gain most of its
force from Danticat’s ability to imagine it from the unique, and intimate,
perspective of her beautifully drawn protagonist and narrator, the young
house-servant Amabelle Désir.
The Dew Breaker both extends and reinforces this complex, ongoing negotiation, on Danticat’s part, of the parallel and complementary
dimensions of individual and collective Haitian and Haitian-diasporic
experience, especially as they emanate from a national past whose mixed
legacy obligates her to confront its violence as much as it entices her to
celebrate its heroism and perseverance. This willingness to explore all
qualities of this mixed legacy can, of course, prove tricky, risky even, for a
writer positioned, like Danticat, not in Haiti, but in a potentially compromised diasporic location. Indeed, Danticat’s insistence on confronting so
unflinchingly the legacy of Haiti’s violent past leaves her open to any number of negative, critical responses. For example, in his 1998 study, Pride
Against Prejudice: Haitians in the United States, immigration sociologist
Alex Stepick makes a very eloquent case for the positive role that cultural
promotion can play in strengthening otherwise (politically, economically)
vulnerable communities, like the poorest inhabitants of Miami’s Little
Haiti, in their struggles to survive in an often deeply hostile “host” culture,
like non-Haitian South Florida’s. “Constantly confronted by prejudice
and discrimination,” Stepick argues, “most Haitians turn to the internal
strengths of their culture. They recall Haiti’s history as having the world’s
only successful slave rebellion, the first free Black republic, and the second
free nation in the Western Hemisphere”; the ability of especially young
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Haitian-Americans to draw positive value from their inherited homeland
culture, Stepick concludes, enables them to survive “the intense struggle
between pride and prejudice,” and ultimately to emerge as fully realized
“multicultural individuals” in their new home (75, 118). Danticat, on the
other hand, makes very few references to this heroic revolutionary past;
in the course of her three novels, she only makes very brief mention of
Toussaint L’Ouverture, Dessalines, and Henri Christophe in The Farming
of Bones, and there she only does so in the course of her protagonist
Amabelle Désir’s ironic meditation on the failure of the Haitian leadership
(especially of President Stenio Vincent) in the 1930s to live up to the standard of those legendary figures in protecting their people from Trujillo’s
slaughter. Indeed, some might even question the propriety of her decision
to publish a work as dark as The Dew Breaker in the same year that was
supposed to mark the bicentennial of Haitian independence.
Of course, Haitian politics did more to mar that anniversary than the
publication of one unflattering novel could ever manage, and while on
one level Danticat’s reticence in addressing the current political crisis
reveals one facet of her relationship to her homeland, on another level her
insistence on laying out as explicitly as possible the actual conditions of
political and social life in late twentieth-century Haiti has everything to do
with her commitment to improving the quality of life for her countrymen
everywhere. In Pride Against Prejudice, Stepick traces in part the difficulty
that non-Haitian Americans had in understanding why exactly Haitians
began emigrating to the United States in such large numbers in the 1970s.
It took until the 1980s, Stepick observes, before “the U.S. government . . .
came to view the corrupt and repressive [Jean-Claude Duvalier] regime as
the root cause of the Haitian refugee problem” (1998, 106), even though
the country had already suffered under the brutal domination of two
Duvaliers for thirty years. According to Charles Arthur, in his 2004 primer
Haiti: A Guide to the People, Politics and Culture, as early as 1957 François
Duvalier was forging “an alliance between the new black middle class and
the black masses,” which “won [him] election as president, [after which
he] moved swiftly to create his own armed power base, in the form of
a presidential militia, dubbed the ‘Tontons Macoutes’” with whose help
he “established a brutal dictatorship” under which “as many as 30,000 of
his opponents were [eventually] killed . . . [while] tens of thousands of
educated Haitians chose to go into exile—to North America, Europe, and
Africa” (23). Stepick concludes, in understandably cynical terms, that “[c]
orruption and repression by friendly, right-wing regimes have seldom
motivated the United States government to push for a change in a foreign
government” (1998, 106). This characterization of what primarily drove
U.S. Cold War–era foreign policy explains both how the Duvaliers could
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exterminate 30,000 of their own people with impunity over three decades
and how the majority of U.S. residents could remain blissfully ignorant
of these atrocities at the same time that they could find themselves much
better informed of less serious abuses in such “enemy” states as Cuba or
North Vietnam.
If the human cost of the violence under the two Duvaliers must remain
inestimable, so must the political, social, and even cultural cost of the same
violence. Arthur makes brief reference to the “tens of thousands of educated Haitians [who] chose to go into exile,” (2004, 23) but that figure cannot begin to describe the actual effect that thirty years of repression had
on, say, Haiti’s intellectual life. In a 1993 interview with the Haitian literary
scholar Yanick Lahens, Clarisse Zimra attempts to assess exactly what Haiti
lost as a result of the Duvaliers’ specific and particularly dirty war against
their country’s intellectual and creative class. According to Zimra, young
Haitian writers emerging in the years following the 1986 fall of JeanClaude Duvalier found themselves challenged to “vault over thirty years
of silence, aggravated exile, persecutions, disruptions” in their attempts
at “birthing a vibrant national literature that [could] simultaneously give
Haiti back to Haitians and the mother island back to the diaspora, as
well as [to] open all Haitians . . . to world literature” (78).4 Zimra credits
the thirty-year Duvalier era with opening instead “the gaping wound”
at the center of Haiti’s cultural history, a wound marking “the absence
of . . . those people . . . whose creativity was snuffed out by repression or
pushed into alien directions by exile”; the Duvaliers, Zimra concludes, thus
“strangled the historical consciousness of the first black people to shake
off the imperialist yoke at a time when other colonized could only dream
of doing so,” installing in the place of that consciousness “a characteristic
institutional amnesia” (78). Danticat herself may therefore view the challenge that Haiti’s recent history poses for her not only through the lens of
her Haitian-ness, but also and at the same time from her perspective as a
writer who knows better than to take for granted her own ability to express
herself freely, and fearlessly, about even the most explosive political questions and controversies.
In fact, Danticat pays very explicit homage to the “lost generation”
of 1960s-era Haitian writers discussed by Zimra and Lahens when she
has the “dew breaker” himself muse about “one of his most famous
victims, the novelist Jacques Alexis” (2004, 198) This turns out to be a
rare moment when the fictional and historical elements of Danticat’s
texts make direct contact; she refuses to invent just any sadistic, torturing thug, but makes him the one responsible for the torture and murder
of the novelist “Jacques-Stephen Alexis” who, as Zimra tells us, “in April
1961 . . . landed on the island to lead a rebellion and was subsequently
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murdered by one of Duvalier’s goons. Alexis’s ill-fated attempt,” Zimra
goes on, “unleashed the first waves of an increasingly brutal repression
and the rise of the Tontons Macoutes,” and it is for this reason that, she
concludes, “1961 remains a highly symbolic year in Haitian cultural history” (1993, 78). And while Alexis’s appearance in Danticat’s story is both
brief and mostly a function of his murderer’s memory of him, it does
allow Danticat to pay him the additional homage of a quotation from one
of his own novels; Danticat has the dew breaker recall a line from Alexis’s
novel Compère Soleil General, which reads, “Tu deviens un veritable gendarme, un bourreau [You are becoming a real policeman, a torturer],” and
which haunts the torturer with the certitude with which it predicts that
even his terrible vocation could come to seem, in the banality resulting
from its routinization, “like any other job” (2004, 198, 243). In addition
to Alexis, Danticat may also be said to pay an even subtler homage in the
title of her text to Jacques Roumain, the defining Haitian novelist of the
generation preceding Alexis’s, whose “greatest legacy,” Charles Arthur tells
us, “was his novel, Masters of the Dew, published posthumously in 1945”
(2004, 81). Danticat’s willingness to position her own work in such explicit
relation to two of the most highly regarded novels produced in the Haiti
of the last century therefore says as much about her commitment to the
celebration and perseverance of Haiti’s literary legacy as it does about her
own ambitions as an (admittedly, but productively) diasporically situated
contributor to that legacy. It also suggests that while Danticat may on the
most explicit level appear to be undertaking a thoroughgoing examination
of the worst crimes committed by Haitians against other Haitians over the
past half-century at least, she also and at the same time clearly means to
honor positive Haitian achievements rendered that much more impressive
for having so often come about under such disabling circumstances. And
it is perhaps this more complex, but more honest, lesson that she hopes to
impart to all her possible audiences.
3. A Confession of Crimes
If Danticat’s commitment to this examination of Haiti’s troubled political past is in part fueled by her identification with some of its victims as
a writer, it is at least as motivated, and perhaps more so, by her identification with another historically vulnerable Haitian population—as a
woman. The Dew Breaker, in fact, departs significantly from Danticat’s
previous two novels in that it focuses chiefly on a male character, and
while there are references in the text to his female victims, almost all the
violence described in any detail in the novel is violence he directs at other
men. In her earlier fiction Danticat has traditionally walked a very fine
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line between her commitment to exposing the extraordinary challenges
that life poses to Haitian, and Haitian-diasporic women in particular,
and her insistence on showing those women in all their complexity; that
is, not merely as victims, but as strong, resourceful survivors who can
not only withstand the worst of abuses but can also emerge as the chief
guarantors of their nation’s, and their culture’s, viability into the future.
The macoute who rapes Martine, the young protagonist Sophie Caco’s
mother in Breath, Eyes, Memory, therefore stands as a kind of precursor for
the torturer so much more fully imagined in The Dew Breaker. Together
these two characters suggest something of Danticat’s awareness that not
all political violence takes place between men in state-run prisons, but can
often take the form of rape in private homes when, say, a state-sanctioned
militia can freely and with impunity terrorize populations of citizens it
perceives, even under the flimsiest of pretexts, to oppose those they serve.
In an article published in the Fall 1999 issue of The Journal of Feminist
Studies in Religion, anthropologist Terry Rey makes a very convincing case
for the programmatic way in which rape has been used as a weapon of
political terror and control in Haiti, from as far back as prerevolutionary,
colonial St. Domingue to as recently at least as the Raoul Cédras regime
that ousted Jean-Bertrand Aristide in 1991 and remained in power until
the U.S.-led invasion of 1994. “The problem of rape,” Rey argues, “is pervasive in Haiti, and has been especially intensive during periods of political upheaval. From day one,” he goes on, “the imposition of new power
structures in Haitian history has consistently featured the rape of women
who are associated with the opposition and with the vanquished” (1999,
82). These practices not only survived, but intensified at various points
in the course of the twentieth century; Rey, for example, cites the “ample
evidence that François Duvalier employed sexual violence and humiliation
as a weapon of intimidation against the political opposition, . . . and as part
of his agenda to create a black elite to counter the long-standing dominance of Haiti’s mulatto elite,” and Rey’s whole article is actually devoted
to demonstrating how, by extending and expanding these practices in the
early 1990s, “the Cédras regime had committed arguably the greatest crime
against womankind in the Caribbean since slavery” (1999, 84, 74).
It bears noting here that Breath, Eyes, Memory appeared the same year
that Cédras was forcibly removed from power and that Aristide was reinstated as Haiti’s president by U.S. forces acting on behalf of the Clinton
administration and with the permission of the United Nations. Ten years
later, history seemed to both repeat and reverse itself, as the United States
again found cause to intercede directly in Haiti’s political life, though this
time to depose Aristide, and Danticat once again found herself publishing a novel on Haitian, and Haitian-diasporic, political themes just as her
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homeland once again commanded the attention of the North American
and even global media. Breath, Eyes, Memory and The Dew Breaker share a
great many elements in common, not least of which is their insistence on
drawing direct lines of causation between violent political repression in
Haiti and the decisions of individuals variously entangled in that violence
to emigrate out of their homeland either to save their lives or redeem their
souls; rarely if ever does Danticat represent the act of Haitian emigration
as simply or exclusively motivated by economic hardship. This suggests
something concerning whom she takes some significant part of her audience to be; while one can safely assume that Danticat would welcome any
and all readers with an interest in what she writes about and why, and
while one can also safely assume that she hopes in part to reach her fellow
Haitians both on and off the island with her work, it is also quite clear
that Danticat writes to educate non-Haitian readers in the United States
(and perhaps the rest of the “first” world) about her country, its history,
and culture, in order to inspire more enlightened, and more sympathetic,
action from them (when they vote, for example, or when they practice
more direct forms of social and political activism) with respect to Haiti,
and to Haitians everywhere. Danticat to her credit both eschews sentimental appeals to pity and refuses to indulge in simple nationalist cultural
boosterism; she is confident enough in her appreciation of her homeland
culture’s considerable strength and beauty to trust that it will be palpable
in everything she writes without her having to resort to grandstanding.
Instead, she leads her readers into the heart, and under the skin, of Haitian
and Haitian-diasporic experience by providing them with the resources
(her stories, her characters, her settings, and the words with which she
animates all of them) to see, and to imagine, her people, and their increasingly transnational life, for themselves.
As I have already begun to suggest above, that life, especially as Danticat
presents it to her readers, affords little in the way of a titillating tropical
exoticism that often characterizes what is marketed as “multicultural”
fiction, and especially when produced by women writers, in first-world
markets; instead, Danticat obligates her readers to undergo at least vicariously some version of the violence that so often threatens human life in
the developing world, and haunts through memory the present lives of so
many who manage to survive that violence by immigrating to more stable
societies in the “developed” world. While there is considerable “literary”
pleasure to be gained from reading Danticat’s work, it mostly, as Steven
Barnes recently observed, has “the cumulative effect . . . of testimony, an
accounting of crimes” (2004). This is especially true of The Dew Breaker;
whereas in Breath, Eyes, Memory the macoute who rapes Martine and
fathers Sophie remains an anonymous ghost haunting the margins of the
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story, The Dew Breaker’s central macoute personage commands far more
significant narrative attention. He dominates both the first and the last
chapters of the novel, while references to him occur in all the intervening
chapters, which read like a loose collection of independent short stories
until the reader realizes that they all involve people whose lives have in
some way been damaged by him and his violence. Danticat also chooses
to arrange the chapters so that they generally travel backward through
time; while the first chapter (“The Book of the Dead”) narrates the elderly
Msye Bienaimé’s confession to his grown, U.S.-born daughter Ka that in
his former life in Duvalier’s Haiti her “father was the hunter, not the prey,”
(20) the last and longest chapter, also titled “The Dew Breaker”(because
he mostly came at dawn to drag his victims to prison, and to death) narrates in detail the events, thirty years in the past, surrounding Ka’s father’s
last brutal act as a macoute, from the varied perspectives of the “hunter,”
his “prey” (a protestant minister, modeled on Danticat’s own uncle, who
dares criticize Duvalier from the pulpit of his church in the Bel-Air quarter
of Port-au-Prince), and the woman who, in spite of being the minister’s
stepsister, would join her fortunes to those of the repentant macoute
and eventually have with him the baby who would grow up in diasporic
Haitian American Brooklyn to become Ka Bienaimé. While at least one
intervening story (“The Book of Miracles”) explicitly connects narrative
threads linking the first story with the last, even without reference to it one
can discern something of the coherence of a world that “The Book of the
Dead” and “The Dew Breaker” together dream into being.
“The Book of the Dead” takes place in contemporary Lakeland, Florida,
where Brooklyn-born and -raised Ka Bienaimé and her Haitian-born, émigré father have traveled in order to deliver a sculpture Ka has made of her
father and sold to Gabrielle Fonteneau, a young Haitian American actress
who is enjoying some success in the United States as the star of a nationally
televised situation comedy. Ka awakens the morning that they are scheduled
to make the delivery to discover that her father has disappeared with their
rental car and her sculpture; he only reappears many anxious hours later to
confess to his daughter that he’s destroyed her work, having thrown it into
what Ka calls “a man-made lake, one of those marvels of the modern tropical city, with curved stone benches surrounding a stagnant body of water.”
We know already from Ka’s description that the sculpture was likely too
abstract (“rough and not too detailed, minimalist at best”) for her father to
fear being recognized by its likeness to him; “I’d used a piece of mahogany,”
she tells us, “that was naturally flawed, with a few superficial cracks along
what was now the back. I’d thought these cracks beautiful and had made
no effort to sand or polish them away, as they seemed like the wood’s own
scars, like the one my father had on his face” (6, 7). Her father explains his
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objections to it as instead ethical, perhaps even spiritual; “When I first saw
your statue,” he tells her, “I wanted to be buried with it, to take it with me
into the other world” (17). Ka understands that her father’s reaction to her
work, like the very fact of her being named “Ka” (that is, “the double of the
body . . . the body’s companion through life and after life, [which] guides
the body through the kingdom of the dead”), stems from his longstanding
fascination with the culture and religion of Ancient Egypt (17). The same
religious impulse that drives his desire to take his daughter’s image of him
when he dies forces him to confess, first to himself and then to her, why
he can’t: “Ka, I don’t deserve a statue . . . not a whole one, at least. You see,
Ka, your father was the hunter, he was not the prey” (20). And from this
distinction, from this basic division of labor between, say, manjeur (eater)
and manjé (eaten), issue forth a string of relevant details: “I was never in
prison . . . I was working in the prison . . . It was one of the prisoners inside
the prison who cut my face in this way . . . This man who cut my face, . . . I
shot and killed him, like I killed many people” (21–22).
This confession, along with Ka’s immediate and more protracted
reactions to it, can tell us a great deal about what Danticat thinks of the
responsibility that might or perhaps should accrue to Haitian writers and
artists of her generation for at least the knowledge of such crimes, as both
inflicted and endured, by countrymen in the generations immediately
preceding their own. If before the confession the sculpture had been for
Ka, as she tells us, “my favorite of all my attempted representations of
my father . . . the way I had imagined him in prison” (6), one of its most
significant effects for her is the loss it occasions of the defining “subject”
of her art, “the prisoner father I loved as well as pitied” (30). “The Book
of the Dead” ends, in fact, with Ka in an unresolved state of paralysis and
suspension, unable to forgive her father for his sordid past, and unable to
forgive both her parents for the conspiracy of lies they undertook together
in “protecting” their daughter from the potential injury of such knowledge.
And this ethical paralysis translates readily for Ka into a creative incapacitation, which she describes in the course of recounting her confrontation
of her mother over the telephone: “As my mother is speaking, this feeling
comes over me that I sometimes have when I’m carving, this sensation
that my hands don’t belong to me at all, that something else besides my
brain and muscles is moving my fingers, something bigger and stronger
than myself, an invisible puppet-master over whom I have no control. I
feel as though it’s this same puppet-master that now forces me to lower the
phone and hang up, in mid-conversation, on my mother” (25). While there
might be good reason to resist forcing too programmatic an allegorical
interpretation onto this passage, and onto the narrative in which it appears,
Danticat at least invites if she does not actively authorize such a reading in
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making her mouthpiece a person who shares so many qualities with herself.
Danticat even opens the acknowledgments that follow the last chapter by
dedicating all of The Dew Breaker to “my father, who, thank goodness, is
not in this book” (243). She thus admits, in making Ka an artist who shares
a number of other qualities with her creator, that she even risked inviting
an even more intimately autobiographical reading, one that risked in turn
casting a very dark shadow on her own father. But Ka, while not fashioned
so closely on Edwidge, at least allows her creator to embody through her a
set of anxieties and concerns that she clearly experiences in a very directly
personal way herself. Through Ka Danticat can voice her own sense that as
an artist, whether she carves wood or fashions worlds out of language, she
is at times beholden to forces so much more powerful than her individual
will that she finds herself forced to surrender herself to them when they are
at their most insistent.
4. A Calculation of Value
Danticat’s representation of Ka’s surrender of artistic agency should not,
however, be taken to suggest a capitulation, on the author’s part, of a
responsibly ethical relationship to the historical events that both couch and
condition her fiction. Ka clearly invested the sculpture of her father with a
very specific set of motivated, and motivating, associations; she personally
could not, however, comprehend let alone control the circumstances (historical, political) that, as a function of her father’s association of radically
different meanings to the same sculpture, sealed the piece’s doom, rendering it the occasion for a profound loss rather than the profit Ka hoped to
garner from its sale to Gabrielle Fonteneau. These conditions necessarily
limit the range and scope of attributions to an artwork that one can definitively assign to the artist, and the difficult lesson that Danticat has Ka learn
in “The Book of the Dead” has everything to do with this necessary check
to her artist ego. Danticat’s own response to questions regarding contemporary Haitian (and, increasingly, Haitian-diasporic) politics, discussed
earlier in relation to the April 2004 interview by Steven Barnes, clearly
emanates from her own learning of this lesson in humility, rather than from
some kind of strategic public disingenuousness that would open her up to
the, at best improbable, at worst disturbing, charge of acting in bad faith
in her attempts to manage her audience’s reception of her work. The “time,
. . . reflection . . . [and] nuance” required for the emergence of the kind of
historical, political wisdom that she hopes will drive her fiction operate
primarily by providing the writer with additional resources that might
minimize (if not completely compensate for) the deficit under which she
works, especially when she most acutely senses “something else . . . bigger
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and stronger than myself ” having its hand in the creative process, and in the
resulting product, for which she alone is conventionally held answerable.
In that same interview, Danticat draws a direct, suggestive parallel between
this individual process of coming to historical wisdom with the collective
process undergone by, say, an entire nation. In a work like The Dew Breaker,
Danticat hopes to contribute, and precisely, strategically from her diasporic
location, to what is now necessarily a transnational process of coming to
terms with all the worst crimes committed, often in the name of the Haitian
people and by institutions (like the nation-state) claiming to act for, and
even as, the Haitian people, against the Haitian people. As Steven Barnes
tells us in his commentary on that interview, “Haiti . . . has never had a full
airing of the traumas inflicted on its people. Danticat thinks such reflection,
in the manner of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, is
not yet possible, because such national self-analysis requires several years of
internal peace and security” (2004). Danticat suggests here that the “vibrant
national literature” invoked by Zimra and Lahens, and still to come from
Haiti, and from Haitians anywhere they reside, could serve as both an effective public vehicle for this self-analysis, as well as a chief and flourishing
by-product of the long dreamed-of “years of internal peace and security.”
In the meantime, Danticat finds herself, like her alter ego, Ka, and like
her nation itself (both as it persists on the island and as it establishes various afterlives across the diaspora), suspended in a state of irresolution and
indeterminacy. She confesses to Steven Barnes that she herself still “could
neither love nor forgive the Dew Breaker,” explaining in fairly explosive
terms as she quotes Joseph Conrad, “I am of the mind of . . . exterminate the
brutes.” That last phrase, from Conrad’s seminal novella Heart of Darkness,
has survived the full century since its writing and reemerged in the era of
postcolonial studies as the truth of the violence motivating the holocaust
we know as the entire European colonial and imperial enterprise, a violence
surviving to our own day through the transfer of imperial eminence from
European to North American hands. It is in the context of this prevailing
imperium that any question of possible justice in Haitian and Haitiandiasporic political matters must necessarily be posed, and while the context
could never simply serve to exonerate or absolve fully willed, and realized,
acts of atrocity, individual and collective, on anyone’s part, it does expand
the scope of executable judgment to cover, and to charge, all responsible
parties. The population of “brutes” whom Danticat cannot yet, if ever, bring
herself to forgive, let alone love, and for whom she continues to hold out
the justice of execution, necessarily includes the Duvaliers and their army of
Tontons Macoutes, but it also includes any number of complicit Haitians,
and a wider, more powerful set of actors in the international scene (powerful, arrogant North American nation-states included) who at least tolerated
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but more likely enabled the brutality of Haitian political life over those
years. The complex interimplication of U.S. and Haitian national histories,
especially in the twentieth century, seems primarily marked by the more
spectacular moments of direct U.S. intercession in Haitian national affairs,
from the long occupation, lasting through 1934, in the early twentieth century to the various coups and additional invasions orchestrated and conducted, respectively, from the United States in the course of the Duvalier
years and certainly for most of Haiti’s more recent, post-Duvalier history.
But this increasingly conjoined, and transnational, U.S./Haitian history
may actually best be represented, and thereby remembered, for having
produced the first large, and viable, Haitian community on American soil,
even as other satellite communities (e.g., St. Lucia, Québec, Paris, Sénégal)
emerged well beyond America, and together came to constitute an increasingly globalized diaspora. If U.S. foreign policy constitutes one form of ongoing “American” influence in and on Haiti, another (equally powerful) is what
Charles Arthur calls the influence “on modern day Haitian society [of] those
one million or so Haitians who live legally in North America . . . [who n]ot
only bolster a failing economy with their remittances that total as much as
US $600 million a year . . . but [who in significant number] return to Haiti at
Carnival and for summer vacations” (2004, 13–14). Edwidge Danticat must
be counted among the most publicly visible and celebrated members of this
diaspora community, a status she does not dare to take either for granted or
too lightly. That status compels her to learn, and to teach, all she can about
not only the Haitian past, especially for all the ways that it helps us explain
the Haitian present, but also about all the possible, and imaginable, Haitian
futures, not all of which will occur exclusively on the island, or within the
borders of the current Haitian state. Books like The Dew Breaker dare to
raise the most disturbing and controversial questions about Haitian (but
perhaps any “national”) political history because it is clear that without such
a “full airing” of national “traumas,” there will be no solution forthcoming
that could guarantee the nation’s (and its diasporas’) long-term survival(s)
into any of a number of possible, and positive, futures, all of them free of
the risks of either repeating or even just matching in degree of brutality the
most explicitly remembered sins of the national past.
254
5. An Indictment of Sentiment
Books like The Dew Breaker also and just as courageously refuse the claim of
the easiest and most conventional of narrative paradigms (e.g., innocence/
fall/redemption) to cast a utopian pall over some messy historical facts.
Her father’s confession to her regarding his life in Haiti does nothing in the
course of the rest of “The Book of the Dead” except to unsettle Ka, and in
255
turn to threaten the emotional, affective, and cultural ties that bind her to her
parents, and to the past, both as legacy and as history, which together they
represent. “[C]onfessions,” Ka understands, “do not lighten living hearts”
(33); their core function, their core value in the secular world, especially, is
certainly not redemptive, not even therapeutic, but forensic; strung together
they form what Ka’s mother Anne calls “a penance procession that has yet to
end,” (238) whether that procession tracks an individual life story, or even
the most complex and crowded history, not of a person, but of a people.
Danticat’s refusal to follow or obey the logic of the Catholic rite of confession, even as she herself invokes its terminology, reinforces her claim in the
Barnes interview that she cannot bring herself to imagine forgiving let alone
loving anyone confessing to the crimes to which Ka’s father confesses; all she
can have Ka do is pose a basic question to her mother, “Manman [mother],
how do you love him?” (24, 239). There is no good answer to this question,
of course, and no easy answer either. The inadequacy of all possible ethical
and philosophical responses to Ka’s question keeps both mother and daughter caught in a suspended state of irresolution, a state that Anne describes as
“this dread, . . . this pendulum between regret and forgiveness” a state that,
for her, and perhaps for Danticat too, transforms into “a now useless cliché”
even the expectation, still held in good faith among a good many people on
earth, “that atonement, reparation was possible and available to everyone”
(242). If conventional religion fails to offer a satisfying response to the ethical problem posed for Danticat in and by recent Haitian political history, so
does the secular “religion” of an unreflective, sentimental nationalism, and
it is with this point that this discussion will close. After Ka’s father confesses
to his daughter, the pair face the obligation of telling their buyer, over lunch
at Gabrielle Fonteneau’s parents’ Lakeland home, some acceptable version
of the story of the sculpture’s destruction. At lunch, Gabrielle Fonteneau’s
mother has occasion to wax patriotic about (what else?) some version of
the pastoral beauty of her, her family’s, and their guests’ native Haiti, and
provokes or occasions from Ka the response that follows: “‘There’s nothing
like sinking your hand in sand from the beach in your own country,’ Mrs.
Fonteneau is saying. ‘It’s a wonderful thing, simply wonderful.’ I imagine my
father’s nightmares. Maybe he dreams of dipping his hands in the sand on a
beach in his own country and finding that what he comes up with is a fistful
of blood” (30).
Notes
1. Most of this passage appears in the “Day 1” segment of the report of the Post
website, which corresponds with the 11 May 2008 segment of the report in the
paper’s print version.
RICARDO L. ORTÍZ
2. Various reputable websites feature this more-or-less standard account of
Danticat’s life; see, for example, http://www.ailf.org/iaa/ny2000/danticat.htm,
the page from its website that the American immigration Law Foundation
devotes to Danticat, whom it honored with an Immigration Achievement
Award in 2000.
3. Danticat’s major bibliography preceding The Dew Beaker therefore reads as
follows: Breath, Eyes, Memory (New York: Soho Press, 1994; novel); Krik? Krak!
(New York: Soho Press, 1995; short fiction); The Farming of Bones (New York:
Soho Press, 1998; novel); The Butterfly’s Way: Voices from the Haitian Dyaspora
in The United States (New York: Soho Press, 2001; edited collection); Behind
the Mountain (New York: Orchard Books, 2002; young adult fiction); After the
Dance: A Walk Through Carnival in Jacmel, Haiti (New York: Crown Publishing,
2002; travelogue).
4. This article feels slightly dated, in part because it appeared two years before the
publication of Breath, Eyes, Memory; for this reason, however, it is also a powerful indicator of just how profoundly Danticat’s appearance has transformed the
Haitian literary landscape, on and off the island.
References
Arthur, Charles. 2004. Haiti: Its People, Politics and Culture. New York: Interlink
Books.
Barnes, Steven. 2004. Tortured History: Novelist Edwidge Danticat’s Dew Breaker
Raises Ghosts of Haiti’s Violent Past and Present. Times-Union of Albany,
NY, April 25, http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/tu_danticat_edwidge.html
(accessed on July 8, 2009).
Briggs, Laura, Gladys McCormick, and J. T. Way. 2008. Transnationalism: A
Category of Analysis. American Quarterly 60.3: 625–48.
Danticat, Edwidge. 2004. The Dew Breaker. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
Priest, Dana, and Amy Goldstein. 2008. Careless Detention: Medical Care in Immigrant
Prisons. The Washington Post, May 11–14, http://www.washingtonpost.com/
wp-srv/nation/specials/immigration/?referrer=emaillink (accessed on July 8,
2009).
Rey, Terry. 1999. Junta, Rape and Religion in Haiti, 1993–1994. Journal of Feminist
Studies in Religion 15.2: 73–100.
Stepick, Alex. 1998. Pride Against Prejudice: Haitians in the United States. Boston:
Allyn and Bacon.
Voices. 2004. University of California, Santa Barbara: Department of Black Studies.
Available online at www.youtube.com/watch?v=YhMk6X3VBrE (accessed on
January 3, 2009).
Zimra, Clarisse. 1993. Haitian Literature After Duvalier: An Interview with Yanick
Lahens. Callaloo 16.1: 77–93.
256
Bill Ashcroft is a founding exponent of postcolonial theory, coauthor of
The Empire Writes Back, the first text to examine systematically a field that
is now referred to as “postcolonial studies.” He is author and coauthor of
several books in the field, variously translated into six languages, including: The Post-Colonial Studies Reader (1995; 2nd ed. 2006); Post-Colonial
Studies: The Key Concepts (1998; 2nd. ed. 2007); Edward Said (2001; 2nd
ed. 2008); Post-colonial Transformation (2001); On Post-colonial Futures
(2001); Caliban’s Voice (2008). He is currently Professor of English at the
University of New South Wales.
María Herrera-Sobek is Associate Vice Chancellor for Diversity, Equity
and Academic Policy and Professor of Chicana/o Studies at the University
of California, Santa Barbara. She is the Luis Leal Endowed Chair and is
the author of The Bracero Experience: Elitelore versus Folklore; The Mexican
Corrido: A Feminist Analysis; Northward Bound: Mexican Immigration in
Ballad and Song; and Chicano Folklore. She has edited and coedited more
than fifteen books and published more than 130 articles and book chapters.
In addition, her poetry has appeared in numerous journals and literary
magazines, and she is one of the featured poets in Three Times a Woman.
Karin Ikas is presently an Assistant Professor/Research Lecturer at
the Departments for Social Sciences and English & American Studies
at Frankfurt University. Homi K. Bhabha prefaced her latest book,
Communicating in the Third Space (coed. with G. Wagner, 2009). Her
other books include the prize-winning Ph.D. thesis Die zeitgenössische
Chicana-Literatur (2000), U.S. Latino Literatures and Cultures (coed.
with F. Lomelí), Chicana Ways (2002), Gender Debat/tl/ed (2003), Stories
from Down Under (coed. with D. Carter), Violence and Transgression in
World Minority Literatures (coed. with R. Ahrens, M. Herrera-Sobek,
and F. Lomeli, 2005). Forthcoming is A Nation Forged in Fire: Canadian
Literature and the Construction of National Identity. Her current research
interest include Pacification Literature, Constructing Gender in the Third
Space as well as Reconciliation and Literature in the Era of Sorry Politics.
Notes on Contributors
Nicolás Kanellos is the Brown Foundation Professor of Hispanic Literature
at the University of Houston. He is founding publisher of the nation’s
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
oldest and most esteemed Hispanic publishing house, Arte Público Press,
the largest, nonprofit publisher of literature in the United States. His
monograph, A History of Hispanic Theater in the United States: Origins to
1940 (1990), received three book awards, including that of the Southwest
Council on Latin American Studies. He is the author of various other
award-winning books on Hispanic cultural history, including Hispanic
Literature of the United States: A Comprehensive Reference (2005), which
was named an Outstanding Academic Book by Choice. Dr. Kanellos is
the director of a major national research program, Recovering the U.S.
Hispanic Literary Heritage of the United States, whose objective is to
identify, preserve, study, and make accessible tens of thousands of literary
documents of those regions that have become part of the United States
from the colonial period to 1960.
Catherine Leen currently holds a position in the Department of Spanish
at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth. In 2005 she was awarded
a fellowship by the Royal Irish Academy through the British Academy
Research Scheme for the purpose of conducting research at the British
Film Institute in London. In the same year she received an NEA-funded
honorarium for the appearance of her work on Bold Caballeros and Noble
Bandidas Project on the website created by the Institute for Humanities
Research at Arizona State University. In February 2007 she was awarded a
Fulbright Fellowship. Her research interests include Chicano Cinema and
Literature, Latin American Literature and Cinema, Latino Writing, U.S.Mexican Border Studies, and Translation.
Tim Libretti is Professor of English, Women’s Studies, and Latino and
Latin American Studies at Northeastern Illinois University in Chicago. He
has authored many articles and book chapters on U.S. working-class literatures, U.S. racial and ethnic literatures, Third World literatures and theory,
Marxism and Cultural Studies, and gay and lesbian literature. In addition to many book chapters, his articles have appeared in such journals
as Modern Fiction Studies, Contemporary Justice Review, College English,
MELUS, Women’s Studies Quarterly, Race, Gender, and Class, Amerasia
Journal, Post Identity, Radical Teacher, and Against the Current, among
others. He is editor of the forthcoming volume Exterminating Narratives:
Identifying and Resisting the Cultural Logics of Genocide (Lexington Books)
and author of The Making of an American Working-Class Literature (under
contract with University of Mississippi Press).
258
Maria Antònia Oliver-Rotger (Ph.D. in American Studies from the
Autonomous University of Barcelona) is an Assistant Professor at Universitat
259
Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, where she teaches English Language and Literature
and Latino/a Cultures in the United States. She is the author of Battlegrounds
and Crossroads: Social and Imaginary Space in Writings by Chicanas (Rodopi,
2003) and of several essays on Latino/a authors such as Rubén Martínez,
Norma Cantú, and Pat Mora, which have appeared in journals and essay collections in Europe and in the United States. She has also translated a volume
of essays on Queer Studies into Spanish. Her research interests include U.S.Latino/a Literature, with an emphasis on Chicano/a Studies and gender.
Ricardo L. Ortíz is Associate Professor of U.S. Latino Literature and Director
of Graduate Studies in the English Department at Georgetown University,
where he also regularly teaches in American Studies. His first book, Cultural
Erotics in Cuban America, was published by the University of Minnesota
Press in 2007; the book received honorable mention for the 2007 Alan Bray
Book Award, given in recognition of outstanding work in LGBTQ Studies
by the GL/Q Caucus of the Modern Language Association. His second book
is tentatively entitled Testimonial Fictions: The Post-Dictatorship Mode in
US Latino Literature and Culture. Prof. Ortíz’s articles and reviews on U.S.
Latino and Queer topics have appeared in such journals as The Yale Journal
of Criticism, Social Text, Theatre Journal, Modern Drama, The Americas, and
Contemporary Literature, as well as in numerous scholarly anthologies.
Gabriele Pisarz-Ramirez has taught at the universities of Göttingen, FU
Berlin, Bielefeld, Bayreuth, and Leipzig and will join the Faculty of American
Studies at the University of Groningen in 2009. She was a Visiting Scholar at
UC Berkeley in 1998/1999 and has recently been a guest lecturer at Stanford
University. Her research focuses on the cultural processes that link American
culture to other cultures or that are situated in between cultures. Her current book project is concerned with the transnational contexts of national
identity formation in the early United States (1776–1840) and positions the
United States in a network of hemispheric and circumatlantic discursive
interrelations.
Ana Patricia Rodríguez is Associate Professor in the Department of Spanish
and Portuguese and U.S. Latina/o Studies at the University of Maryland,
College Park, where she teaches courses in Central American and U.S. Latina/o
literatures and cultures. She received her M.A. and Ph.D. in Literature from
the University of California, Santa Cruz. Professor Rodríguez’s research
focuses on the cultural production of Central Americans in the isthmus and
in the wider Central American diaspora. She is the author of numerous articles as well as the book Dividing the Isthmus: Central American Transnational
Histories, Literatures, and Cultures (University of Texas Press, 2009).
Marta E. Sánchez is currently a Professor in the Department of Transborder
Chicana/o and Latina/o Studies at Arizona State University. Previously,
she was a Professor in the Literature Department at the University of
California, San Diego. She is the author of Contemporary Chicana Poetry:
A Critical Approach to an Emerging Literature (University of California
Press, 1985), the first critical analysis of poetry by Chicanas, and “Shakin’
Up” Race and Gender: Intercultural Connections in Puerto Rican, African
American and Chicano Narratives and Culture 1965–1995 (University of
Texas Press 2005). She has published articles in PMLA, Diacritics, MELUS,
SigloXX/20th Century, American Literary History, American Literature, and
Genders. She is editor of the series “Latinidad: Transnational Cultures in
the United States,” published by Rutgers University Press.
Claudia Sadowski-Smith is Assistant Professor of English at Arizona State
University. She is the author of Border Fictions: Globalization, Empire, and
Writing at the Boundaries of the United States (University of Virginia Press,
2008) and the editor of Globalization on the Line: Culture, Capital, and
Citizenship at U.S. Borders (Palgrave, 2002). In addition, Dr. SadowskiSmith has published several articles on immigration, border theory, literatures of the U.S.-Mexico border, and the internationalization of American
Studies in such journals as American Quarterly, South Atlantic Quarterly,
Comparative American Studies, Arizona Quarterly, and Diaspora.
Harald Zapf, is Assistant Professor of American Studies at the University
of Erlangen-Nürnberg (Germany), and has studied literary theory,
American, Latin American, Spanish, and German literature in Erlangen
and Albuquerque, New Mexico. He is the author of Dekonstruktion des
Reinen: Hybridität und ihre Manifestationen im Werk von Ishmael Reed and
is currently working on his habilitation on performance and performativity in twentieth-century American poetic culture(s).
260
Acosta, Iván 37
super, El, 37 40
Agarwal, Bina 89
Alcaraz, Lalo 225
Alexandria Gazette 110
Alexis, Jacques 246
Algarín, Miguel 9, 117, 118, 119, 120, 121,
122, 123, 124, 125, 128, 129, 131, 132
Alonso, Carlos 51–52
Alurista 37
Alvarez, Julia 40
How the García Girls Lost Their
Accent 40, 55
In the Time of the Butterflies 55
Anaya, Rudolfo 27
Bless Me, Ultima 40, 55
Anzaldúa, Gloria 21–23, 68, 173, 174,
177, 215
Borderlands/La Frontera 21, 173, 174,
177
“mestiza consciousness” 173
Tortilla curtain 22
Aparicio, Frances 55
“sub-versive” narratives 55
Arau, Sergio 61, 63, 71
Arce, Julio 35
Arellano, Anselmo 54
Arenas, Reinaldo 37, 41
Aristide, Jean-Bertrand 248
Arizmendi, Yareli 61, 63, 72
Arteaga, Alfred 21
Artenstein, Isaac 223
Arthur, Charles 245, 247
Masters of the Dew 247, 254
Ashcroft, Bill 5–6, 13–27, 159, 160,
168, 257
Aztlán 13–27
borderlands 20–27
Chicano nationalism 17–18
cosmopolitanism 14
Plan Espiritual de Aztlán, El 17
transnation 13–27
Utopia 16–17
autoethnography 171–93
Avilés, Quique 202, 203, 207, 212, 213,
215–16
Anthems 203, 204, 207, 208, 214
Azuela, Mariano 42
de abajo, Los 42
Baeza Ventura, Gabriela 32
Baker-Cristales, Beth 201
Bakhtin, Mikhail 119
Bandau, Anja 159
Baraka, Amiri 117
Bardales, Aída 50
Barlow, Joel 98, 99, 100
Visions of Columbus, The 100, 101, 112
Barnes, Steven 243
Barthes, Roland 181
Lover’s Discourse, A 181
Bauer, Ralph 100
Beach, Christopher 121, 122, 124, 125–26
Bearden, Michelle 50
Bencastro, Mario 36
Odisea del Norte 36, 42
Berlant, Lauren 205–6, 210, 211
Bhabha, Homi 2, 164, 168
Biemann, Ursula 75
Bierhorst, John 163
bildungsroman 42
Blanton, Casey 173
Blom, Frans and Trudy 184
Bolom, Na 184
border literature 37
“border thinking” 174
Borm, Jan 194
Bourne, Randolph 3–4
Index
INDEX
Bowden, Charles 75
Brecht, Bertolt 157, 160, 161
Little Organum for the Theater 161
Brickhouse, Anna 95, 97
Transamerican Literary Relations and
the Nineteenth Century Public
Sphere 97
Briggs, Laura 4, 85, 241
Bruce-Novoa, Juan 44
Butler, Judith 132
Cadaval, Olivia 201
CAFTA (Central America Free Trade
Agreement) 54
Camplis, Francisco 230
Carrasco, David 69
Carrillo, Adolfo 33
Castellanos, Rosario 175
Castillo, Ana 55
Mixquiahuala Letters 55, 140, 141
Cédras, Raoul 248
Certeau, Michel de 25
Chabram-Dernersesian, Angie 78
Chambers, Iain 178
Chatwin, Bruce 178
Cheah, Pheng 89
Chicano nationalist politics 137–53
Cisneros, Sandra 40
Caramelo 40, 55
House on Mango Street, The 55
Woman Hollering Creek 55
Clark, Steve 173, 174, 177, 188, 189
Clifford, James 174, 185
Colón, Jesús 35
Conger, Danielle 101
Conrad, Joseph 253
Cooper-Alarcón, Daniel 196
Aztec Palimpsest, The 195
Cota-Cárdenas, Margarita 215
Cotto-Thorner, Guillermo 37
Trópico en Manhattan 37
Cruz, Nicky 40
Run, Baby, Run 40, 41
Culler, Jonathan 124, 127, 131,
134
cultural citizenship 206–7
Culture Clash 225
Dalton, Roque 210
Historias prohibidas del pulgarcito
Danticat, Edwidge 11
Breath, Eyes, Memory 243, 248, 249
Brother, I’m Dying 238, 244
Dew Breaker, The 237–55
Farming of Bones, The 244, 245
Krik? Krak! 243
Day Without a Mexican A, 7
De la Vega, Garcilaso 100
Comentarios Reales de los Incas 100
De las Casas, Bartolomé 100
Brevísima Relación de la destrucción de
las Indias 100, 103
De León, Arnoldo 107, 159
Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari 24–25
Derrida, Jacques 175
diasporic transnationalism 88–90
Díaz, Junot 40
Brief Wonderous Life of Oscar Wao,
The 40, 55
Drown 55
Díaz Guerra, Alirio 33
Lucas Guevara 33, 41, 44
Dorfman, Ariel 36
muerte y la doncella La, 36, 37
Drexler, Michael 96
Duarte, Stella 87–88, 89
Dunlap, William 98, 101
Pizarro in Peru 101–4
Duvalier, François 248
Duvalier, Jean-Claude 245
Echeverría, Nicolás 229
Cabeza de Vaca 229, 230
Elizondo, Father Virgilio 68
Future Is Mestizo, The 68, 69
Elizondo, Sergio 23
Elliott, Emory 95
Espinosa, Conrado 42
sol de Tejas, El 42
Esquivel, Laura 50
Como agua para chocolate 50
Estep, Maggie 131, 132
ethnic cleansing 141
210
262
Falk, Richard 3
Fanon, Frantz 4, 18, 141–42, 148, 153
Fischer, Michael 174
Fisher-Fishkin, Shelley 95
Flint, Timothy 104
Francis Berrian 104–7, 112
Flores, Juan 39, 213, 215
Divided Borders 39
Flores, Lauro 172
Flores, William 206
Foucault, Michel 26–27, 195
Fox, Claire F. 223
Fredonian Rebellion 109
Fregoso, Rosa Linda 76
Freneau, Philip 98–100, 101, 103, 112
Frow, John 184, 195
Frye, Northrop 127
Funke, Thorsten 80
Gaines, Reg 129, 130, 132
Galeani, Eduardo 196
García, Cristina 1–2
Dreaming in Cuban 1, 40, 55
García-Acevedo, María Rosa 62
García-Canclini, Néstor 222
Gaspar de Alba, Alicia 40
Sor Juana’s Second Dream 40
Desert Blood 40, 77, 78, 82–86,
88, 89
Gates, Jr., Henry Louis 130
Gilroy, Paul 15, 23, 140, 141
Glick-Schiller, Nina 2–3, 29
Goldman, Francisco 215
Goldstein, Amy 237, 238, 240
Gómez-Peña, Guillermo 10–11, 118, 133,
221–33
Border Brujo 223, 224, 233
Dangerous Border Crossings 227
Friendly Cannibals 226
Great Mojado Invasion, The 222,
228–33
Gómez-Quiñones, Juan 137–38, 139,
140, 142
Gonzales, Rodolfo “Corky” 158
González, Leopoldo 36
Abajo Franco 36
González, Lilo 202, 210, 211, 212
González Viaña, Eduardo 41
corridor de Dante, El 41, 42
Graulich, Michael 166
Gray, Paul 33
Green, Duncan 223
Guerrero, Sergio 63, 72
Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich 124
Production of Presence 124
Guzzardi, Joe 71
263
Hamilton, Nora 201
Hannerz, Ulf 157
Hanson, Victor David 158
Hejinian, Lyn 127
Heredia, José María 37, 38
Hernández Cruz, Víctor 38
Herrera, Juan Felipe 171–93
Mayan Drifter 171–93
Herrera-Sobek, María 7, 61–72
Day Without a Mexican, A 7, 61–72
Northward Bound: Mexican Immigration
in Ballad and Song 61, 257
transnational migrations 7
heterotopia 25–26
Hijuelos, Oscar 43, 55
Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love 55
Hinojosa, Rolando 37, 39, 137, 138, 146
Valley, The 146
Hispanicization 139, 141
Hodges, Graham 133
Holland, Patrick 173, 177, 178, 191
Holman, Bob 117–18, 121, 129, 132
Hopper, Paul 221
Huggan, Graham 173
Hulme, Peter 194
Colonial Encounters 194
Hunt, Alfred 107
Huntington, Samuel 158
Who Are We? America’s Great
Debate 158
Hurston, Zora Neale 240
identificational transnationalism 78
internal colonization 20
Ikas, Karin 9–10, 157–68, 159, 161, 257
Jameson, Fredric 186
Jennings, Keith 210
Johnson, William 224
Kane, Daniel 121, 122
Kanellos, Nicolás 6, 29–44, 257–58
colonial 32–34
exile 32–34, 36
immigrant 32–34
native 32–34
textual characteristics of U.S. Hispanic
literature 34
transmigrants 29
transnational literary texts 6
INDEX
INDEX
Kaplan, Caren 178
Kaup, Monika 159
Kelleter, Frank 96
Kelly, Philip 222
Kim, Katherine 214
Kiser, Karin 49, 51
Klein, Richard 126
Klor de Alva, Jorge 19, 196
Kumar, Amitava 193
künstlerroman 42
Lahens, Yanick 246, 253
Laviera, Tato 37, 38, 39, 215
Lawrence, G. Desmond 166
Leal, Luis 33, 37
Leen, Catherine 10–11, 221–34, 258
“Final Frontier, The” 10–11
Gómez-Peña, Guillermo 10–11, 221–34
Lehr, Jim 52
León-Portillo, Miguel 165
Libretti, Tim 9, 137–53, 258
Limón, Graciela 55, 137, 138, 147, 148,
150, 151
Day of the Moon, The 138, 149, 150
Erased Faces 138
In Search of Bernabé 55, 138, 147, 148,
149
Linebaugh, Peter and Marcus
Rediker 107–8
Lipski, John 213
Lisle, Debbie 173
“cosmopolitan vision” 173
Global Politics of Contemporary Travel
Writing, The 173, 176, 184, 185, 192
Lomelí, Francisco 159, 194
López, Ana M. 229
Lopez, Jennifer 79
Loisaida 120–21
LOTE (Language Other than English) 51
L’Ouverture, Toussaint 111
Maciel, David
México de afuera, El 32, 35, 38, 62
Mahler, Sarah 201
maquilas (maquiladoras) (assembly
plants) 8, 75–76, 77, 78, 87
Mariel generation 41
Marín, Cheech 232
Born in East L.A. 232
Marqués, René 33
Carreta Made a U-Turn, La 36
Martí, José 32
“Nuestra América” 32
Martínez, Douglas 204, 205
Martínez, Tomás Eloy 36
Santa Evita 36, 37, 41
McCormick, Gladys 241
McCracken, Ellen 153
Mehne, Phillip 127
Meléndez, Gabriel 54
Menchú, Rigoberta 175, 180, 181
I, Rigoberta Menchú 175, 181
Mendieta, Eduardo 232–33
Menjívar, Cecilia 201
“mestiza consciousness” 174
mestizaje 69, 17
“methodology of the oppressed” 182
Mexican Revolution 43
“Mexifornia” 158, 159
Mignolo, Walter 51
“border thinking” 174
Mill, Sara 194
Discourses of Difference 194
Miller, Mary 165
Miller, Mary Ellen 166
mockumentary 63
Mohr, Nicholasa 40
Nilda 40
Montoya, Richard 204
Moraga, Cherríe 137, 138–39,
140–45, 148, 151, 153, 160–61, 163–68
Hispanicization 139, 141
Hungry Woman, The 160, 161, 167
Last Generation, The 160
“Queer Aztlán” 138, 139, 144, 145,
147, 151
This Bridge Called My Back 160
Waiting in the Wings 161
Morales, Ed 118, 121, 133, 215
Morris, Tracie 129, 132
Morton, Carlos 37
Mujeres Unidas de Juárez (United Women
of Juárez) 87
264
NAFTA (North American Free Trade
Agreement) 62, 53, 54, 75–76, 81,
184, 192, 223
Nathan, Debbie 75, 82
nationness 49
Nava, Gregory 77
Bordertown 77, 78, 79, 80, 82, 224
Norte, El 80, 88, 89
INDEX
Obejas, Achy 71
O’Farrill, Alberto 35
Oliver-Rotger, Maria Antònia 10, 159,
171–93, 258
Ong, Walter 36
Operation Gatekeeper 53, 54
Operation Hold-the-Line 53
“oppositional consciousness” 174
O’Reilly Herrera, Andrea 1
Ortíz, Ricardo 11
Ospina, Carmen 49
pachuco 39
Paredes, Américo 38
George Washington Gómez 39
Parra, Max 54
Pease, Donald 104
Pedersen, David 201
Pelley, Scott 238
Peñalosa, Fernando 215
Pereda, Prudencio de 43
Pérez-Firmat, Gustavo 37, 39
Pérez-Torres, Rafael 174
Piñero, Miguel 121, 125
Portes, Alejandro 214
Pisarz-Ramírez, Gabriele 8, 95–113, 259
hemispheric writing 8
Pita, Beatrice 49
Plan Espiritual de Aztlán, El 159
Pocha Nostra 221
Pope Duarte, Stella 77
femicide 86–89
If I Die in Juárez 77, 78, 86–88
Portillo, Lourdes 76
Señorita Extraviada (Missing Young
Woman) 76, 77, 82
postcolonial 19–20
postcolonial mestizaje 174
Post-Movement Literature 137–53, 194
Pratt, Mary Louise 50, 51, 159, 174, 175,
186, 194
Imperial Eyes 194
Priest, Dana 237, 238, 240
Quesada, Roberto 41
Big Banana, The 41
Nunca entres por Miami 41
Quintana, Alvina 174
Quintanilla-Pérez, Selena 79
Ramírez, Francisco 33
Ramírez Berg, Charles 224, 225
Raza Cósmica, La (The Cosmic
Race) 142, 147, 148
“Rebeldes, Los” (The Rebels) 77, 82
Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary
Heritage Project 30
Rembao, Alberto 42
Lupita 42
Repak, Terry 201
Rey, Terry 248
Rich, Adrienne 195
Rinehart, Lucy 101
Rivera, Tomás 40
Rodríguez, Ana Patricia 10, 201–20, 259
Rodríguez, José Policarpo 41
Rodríguez, Netty and Jesús 36
Me voy pa’ México 36
Una mula de tantas 36
Rodríguez, Richard 4, 42
Hunger of Memory 42
Roumain, Jacques 247
Rony, Fatimah Tobing 229
Rosaldo, Renato 191
Culture and Truth 191, 195
Russwurm, John and Samuel
Cornish 108–9
Sadowski-Smith, Claudia 7–8, 75–90, 260
gender-based violence 7
maquiladoras (assembly plants) 8, 75
Saldívar, José David 159
Saldívar, Ramón 159
Dialectics of Difference 159
Saldívar-Hull, Sonia 153
Sale, Maggie Montesinos 108
Salinas, Ric 204
Salvadoreñidades 201, 202, 203,
212, 213
Sánchez, Marta 6–7, 47–58, 260
“trans-national translation” 6
Spanglish 48
Sánchez, Rosaura 37, 49, 53, 215
Sánchez Jankowski, Martín 137
Sánchez Molina, Raul 201
Negritude 209
New Frontier/La Nueva Frontera 67
new world order 118, 228
Nuestras Hijas de Regreso a Casa (May
Our Daughters Return Home) 79
Nuevo Mundo, El (The New World) 33
Nuyorican Poets Café 8–9, 117–28
265
INDEX
Sandoval, Chela 174, 179, 180, 181, 186
“methdology of the oppressed” 182
“oppositional consciousness” 174
Santiago, Esmeralda 55
Almost a Woman 55
When I Was Puerto Rican 55
Sassen, Saskia 4, 157, 222
Savin, Ada 54
Schmidt Camacho, Alicia 88
Seguín, Juan Nepumoceno 41
Sellén, Francisco 40
Hatuey 40
Shell, Marc and Werner Sollors 52, 56
Shorris, Earl 139
Siguenza, Herbert 204
Silva Gruesz, Kirsten 97
Ambassadors of Culture 97
Silverman, Kenneth 99
Singer, Audrey 208
Smith, Sidonie 178
Solano, Gustavo 40
Sangre 40
Sommer, Doris 215
Bilingual Games 215
Spanglish 48
Spivak, Gayatri 176
Stavans, Ilan 48
Stepick, Alex 244–45
Stewart, Miranda 2l3
Stratton, Richard 118
Streeby, Shelley 107
Strohschänk, Johannes 102
Suárez, Virgil 40
Going Under 40
Suchlicki, Jaime 223
Sylvester, Everton 132
Tatum, Charles 175, 194
teatro campesino 192
“third differential zone” 181
“Third Worldism” 143
Thomas, Piri 40
Down These Mean Streets 40, 55
“Toltecas, Las” 77
Tontons Macoutes 245, 247, 253
Torres, Teodoro 39
patria perdida, La 39
Tortilla curtain 22
Toussaint, Marlene-Racine 239, 240
transcultural interethnic identities 209
transculturation 215
transethnic 52
“Transfrontera contact zone” 159
translingual 52
transmigrants 29
transnation 13–27, 159–60
transnational activism 89
transnational heterotopia 8–9
transnational immigration 203
transnational logic 202
transnational matrix 241
transnational migratory movement 62
tropicalization 38
Trouillot, Michel Rolphe 107
Tyree, Andrew 122
Valdez, Luis 37, 40
Vendidos, Los 40
Zoot Suit 40
Vaquero de Ramírez, María 213
Varela, Félix 37, 41
Vasconcelos, José 17
Venegas, Daniel 33
aventuras de Don Chipote, Las 33, 36, 42
Venuti, Lawrence 56
Vigil, Evangelina 37
Villa, Daniel 50
Villarreal, José Antonio 54
Pocho 54
Viramontes, María Helena 137, 138, 147,
151, 152, 153
Moths, The, 151
Von Kotzebue, August 102, 103, 112
Voz de México, La 33
Wertheimer, Eric 100, 101
West, Dennis 232
Williams, Crystal 124
Wolosky, Shira 130, 131
Wong, Sau-Ling 145
Wood, Alylish 224
Youngs, Tim 178
266
Zapatistas 172, 178, 191, 192, 223, 227
Zapf, Harald 8–9, 37, 117–34, 260
Algarín, Miguel 9
Holman, Bob 9
Nuyorican Poets Café 8–9
transnational heterotopia 8–9
Zentella, Ana Celia 215
Zimra, Clarisse 246, 253

Imagined Transnationalism - Graduate Institute of International and

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